Awakening - Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

March 21 - To Harbor or Release

~How can you follow the course of your life if you do not let it flow?~ - Lao-Tzu

The pollen collects until the rain washes away whatever has not been taken as seed. The moss forms on stumps and rocks until the feet of animals wear it off. The leaves that cover the path disintegrate in time to show the lost their way.

It is the same with us. Our dreams collect like pollen until the sweat and tears of our living them washes away whatever has not become possible. Our soft gnarly clumps of attachment grow out of our stone - joy and sorrow alike - until what is food is eaten and what is not is worn away. Like fallen leaves, our memories cover our path until they are remembered out of existence, setting us free.

Often the pain of resisting makes us rust like iron, and in order to re-enter the flow of life, we need to be scraped back to our original surface. Our feelings, if not released, bread the heart with their grit. Like windows filmed by weather, we wait on living hands to be rubbed clear. It is inevitable. Experience covers us over, and the expressive journey lets us come clean to the table of light. Again.

All things in existence participate in this involuntary cycle. For human beings, the process of living stains us repeatedly with the grit of being here, with heartache and disappointment and the pointedness of being human, which can sicken us if harbored or make us whole if released. Again and again, we, more than any other life form, have this majestic and burdensome power to harbor or release the impact of our experience.

Humbly, we are asked to keep the flow real between what is taken in and what is let out. We have only to breathe to remember our place as a living inlet. Experience in, feelings out. Surprise and challenge in, heartache and joy out. In a constant tide, life rushes in, and in constant release, we must let it all run back off. For this is how the earth was made magnigicent by the sea and how humankind is carved upright, again an again, by the ocean of spirit that sets us free.

 

This is so beautiful and real. The very life of life. I read this over and over just breathing it in and out, and feeling the pulse of the blood in my veins.

 

Yes... it was very beautiful and simple in its complexity.

 

March 22 - Sabbath Time

~Work when there is work to do. Rest when you are tired. One thing done in peace will most likely be better than ten things done in panic.... I am not a hero if I deny rest; I am only tired.~ - Susan McHenry

When I need to be refreshed or renewed, I return to doorways of heart that have opened me before. I walk and stand beside the big willow and wait for its famiiar sway to speak to me. I replay that special piece of piano music that made its way into the sore crease of my heart and let things unfold. I make some tea and sit in my favorite chair and carefully pull out my old and tattered e. e. cummings book and read "i thank you god for most this amazing day...."

I try to open the hours with softness and silence - the two threads that unravel into gratitude - and wait for the miracle to return. This is the renewing atom of Sabbath for me. I try to start each day with such a small endearing moment, before the bumps and nicks and noise rush in, before the confusions and conflicts tighten my sense of things.

For me, the heart constricts and dilates like the eye. When it's constricted, there is no rest; the world seems smaller and meaner and full of danger. So Sabbath time becomes essential as a practice that dilates everything tight. These private moments of rest restore - make ore out of rest - and loosen the knots of the world by slowing down the heart.

In rest, I always remember that what ties me to the earth is unseen. Just the other day, I was constricted. My heart was beating like a heron awakened in the weeds, no room to move. Tangled and surprised by the noise of my mind, I fluttered without grace to the center of the lake which humans call silence. I guess, if you should ask, peace is no more than the underside of tired wings resting on the lake, while the heart in its feathers pounds softer and softer.

 

OMG, I LOVE this one. It is so true. We - as a society lately - glamorize multitasking which for the most part is just slipshod work done in haste.

 

Ditto. This is so true.

 

March 23 - Never Knowing Where We Fly

~Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.~

There is a deep and humbling lesson in the way of birds. Their wings grow and stretch and span patches of air. First tentatively and then with confidence, they lift, they pump, they glide, they land. It seems, for birds, it is the act of flying that is the goal. True, they migrate and seek out food, but when flying, there is the sense that being aloft is their true destination.

Unlike birds, we confuse our time on Earth, again and again, with obsessions of where we are going - often to the point that we frustrate and stall our human ability to fly. We frequently tame and hush our need to love, to learn, to know the truth of spirit, until we can be assured that our efforts will take us somewhere. All these conditions and hesitations and yes-buts, and what ifs turn the human journey upside down, never letting the heart, wing that it is, truly unfold.

Yet, without consideration or reservation, it is simply the presence of light that stirs birds to sing and lift. They do not understand concepts such as holding back or only investing if the return seems certain. In this, we are the only creatures that seek out guarantees, and in so doing, we snuff the spark that is discovery.

Just how often do we cripple ourselves by not letting love with all its risks teach us how to fly? How many times do our hearts stall because we won't let the wingspan of our passion open us fully into our gifts? How frequently do we search for a song of guidance that can only come from inside us?

I know that over the years, through fear and expectation, my mind has gathered and hoarded places I needed to go, things I needed to have, selves I needed to be. But here I am, without most of them - the goals and wants all used up in learning how to love.

So, try as I do to imagine and construct where I am headed, try as I will to plan and know what this life of feeling means, it is the pulse of what I feel itself that lifts me into spirit. In truth, wings don't grow any differently to fit south or east or west, and our lives, no matter how we train ourselves, are more fundamental than any direction of worldly ambition. We, like the birds, are meant to fly and sing - that's all - and all our plans and schemes are twigs of nest that, once outgrown, we leave.

 

Another nice one.

 

March 24 - Even in the Dark

~To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.~

Seldom seen, growing along the ocean floor, the white-plumed anemone is a watery blossom. It is white lace opening under tons of black, opening as if bathed in th sun, while so far from the sun.

This is the trick to staying well, isn't it: to feel the sun even in the dark. To not lose the truth of things when they go out of view. To grow just the same. To know there is still water, even when we are thirsty. To know there is still love, even when we are lonely. To know there is still peace, even when we are suffering.

None of this invalidates our pain, but only strengthens our way back into the light.

 

This is something many here can relate too. Many anywhere really.

 

Yes, to know no matter how dark, alone, or how much we are suffering, there is hope. To know that, and to hold that, can carry you through the most lowly, painful, and desperate moments. This was a nice reminder.

 

March 25 - The Ear as Petal

~The ear is only a petal that growns from the heart. When we hear each other, it all becomes a garden.~

Just what does it mean to listen? We have all exhibited the remarkable mental dividedness whereby we choose not to pay attention, and yet when asked, we can recite word for word what has been said.

Listening arises from a deeper place, and it seems we can only hear the living to the extent that we have truly lived, only understand pain and joy to the extent that we have allowed ourselves to be touched by life. If the ear grows from the heart like a petal, than as roots absorb rain and sun until a simple flower opens, the heart must absorb both tears and joy in order to sprout an ear that can truly hear.

I remember, years before cutting my feet in search of a path, sitting on my immigrant grandmother's hospital bed, watching her wince as they put gauze on her bedsore heels. I remember, years before I saved my golden retriever from drowning, watching a coworder cry for his dead dog, tryng to understand how he could love an animal more than a person. I remember, years before having to start my life over, racing down a farmhouse road in the middle of the night to see my father-in-law's proud eyes just as the barn he built thirty years before was burning to the ground.

It was only later that I felt their pain, and even more, their true joy in caring for things. To be sure, we do not have to experience the same things to receive each other, but we do have to experience what is ours to live through before life will sow its roots.

What does it take to truly listen? The breakdown of everything that parades between our hearts. If I dare to hear you, I will feel you like the sun and grow in your direction, and you in mine. For when we hear each other, it all becomes a garden. It all becomes edible.

 

This is so true. And yet so often it seems scary to listen. Why is that? Are we afraid we will miss our chance to speak? Or that someone has an unflattering thought about us that they have not yet spoken? That there is some terrible thing that I don't want to know about a minute sooner than necessary?

It was only later that I felt their pain, and even more, their true joy
The older I get the more I understand that line.

 

March 26 - Feeling Your Feelings

~The fastest way to freedom is to feel your feelings.~ - Gita Bellin

This sounds pretty simple, but though it's easy to kow you have feelings, easy to know their weight and agitation and suddenness of mood, it is another, more subtle matter to feel them - that is, to let them penetrate your being the way wind snaps through a flag.

This is necessary because if we don't feel our feelings all the way through, they never leave us, and then we do all kinds of unusual things to get out from under them. This is the cause of many an addiction.

I've diverted myself many times by becoming involved in what surrounds my pain or sadness, while never feeling the thing itself. So when someone asks me how I feel, I wind up retelling the circumstance of the pain, but no feeling it. Or strategizing what to do next, but not feeling it. Or anticipating reactions, but not feeling what is mine to feel. Or swimming in the anger of injustice, but not diving through the wound. Though we fear it, feeling our feelings is the only clear and direct way to free our hearts of pain.

 

So true

 

Yes, this is so true. Sometimes the truth is too painful to face or bear and one turns to alcohol, drugs, sex, spending, you name it, anything that's usually destructive to avoid feeling feelings and being honest. It's so difficult and painful. But with courage and support freedom is the reward.

Love this one.

 

March 27 - We Are Born Singing

~Song is not a luxury, but a necessary way of being in the world.~

Somehow we have been fooled into thinking that song is entertainment, something we can do without, like dessert. But to give voice to what lives inside is what keeps all things possible. In truth, the minute we arrive we are born singing, though this is often mistaken for crying. Yet without this deep reflex, the lungs won't work and the lifelong exchange between inner and outer can't begin.

I remember my first day alone at home after my rib surgery. For the fist time in months, everything was still, the morining light now filling the space where my rib used to be. Suddenly, finally, I began to weep, loudly, as pockets of fear and pain and exhaustion escaped. This release was a song, and what I hadn't realized was that, once released, once the buildup of my journey was given a way out, life with its thousand energies and softnesses could come in.

Such a simple secret: by letting thing out, we also let things in. So if you're cut off, in pain, estranged, numb - sing, give voice to anything. It needn't sound pretty. Simply, bravely, open despite the difficulty, and let what is in out, and what is out in. Sing, and your life will continue.

 

I love this one...it's like giving ourselves permission to cry or scream or whatever we need to do to feel our emotions so that we can begin to heal. Very nice.

 

March 28 - The Gift of Shedding

~From the beginning, the key to renewal has been the casting off of old skin.~

It is interesting that the earliest peoples believed in something that we, in our modern hive of manufacturing, have forgotten - that immortality is attainable by shedding. The Dusuns of North Borneo have believed for centuries that when God finished creating the world, He announced that "Whoever is able to cast off his skin shall not die."

But what does this mean? Not that we can live forever, but that the way to stay closest to the pulse of life, the way to stay in the presence of that divine reality which informs everything is to be willing to change. Still, change what? To change whatever has ceased to function within us. To shed whatever we are carrying that is no longer alive. To cast off our dead skin because dead skin can't feel. Dead eyes can't see. Dead ears can't hear. And without feeling, there is no chance of wholeness, and wholeness remains our best chance to survive the pain of breaking.

Of course, for human beings, dead skin takes many forms, the most significant of which remain intangible but suffocating, such as a dead way of thinking, a dead way of seeing, a dead way of relating, a dead way of believing, or a dead way of experiencing.

In essence, shedding opens us to self-transformation. Paradoxically, those of us who refuse such renewal will sooner or later, be forced to undergo transformation anyway as a result of being broken or eroded by the world. Very often both occur at the same time: that is, we shed from within while being eroded from without.

 

Can we just lay down our burdens and walk on?