These days are like scooping mercury. Chasing after it can be so exhausting as it beads and evades more with each attempt to contain it.
Feeling the need to clean it up, but might just have to sit here for a bit and just watch as it glides and rolls around making beautiful patterns and shapes.
Remarkable how something so potentially harmful can have such valuable purpose and be so beautiful.
Feeling the tug on the visceral thread that connects us all…riding the wave…knowing we are all so bravely in this together.
Through your accomplishments I gain confidence in my ability to move the world.
In your mistakes I recognize your willingness to be my teacher.
In your humility I lay down my need to fight for my existence.
In your weakness I see the most incredible power.
Each time I pause to notice, I cannot help but shed tears of incredible gratitude and honor in feeling into life through your heart and eyes.
Both chairs are always available to you. One sits above and allows you to sprinkle your wisdom confidently, but also requires you to hold a caring space, to lift me up. The other sits at the feet of the first, providing a place to listen, learn and receive, ignighted by curiosity and wonder.
Which seat do you choose? Can you find a way to sit under, to humbly receive and accept knowledge and perspective from others? Can you sit above without looking down and casting a shadow?
Is there a way you can fit in either seat depending not on what you desire but on what I need?
Please come sit with me for a spell.
We are woven of a universal thread, patterned and cut in such a way, no stitch exactly the same.
And when we come together, we can compete for the title of most beautiful, richest, warmest, brightest, or boldest.
Or we can weave together in such a way that our beauty, our richness, our warmth are shared. We can accent each other’s best qualities to be the brightest and boldest of all.
For when I stand in the magnificence of you, I realize my magnificence too.
On this road of life, we are fortunate there are many places to stop for nourishment and refueling.
The key is to listen for sounds of rumbling and feel for the vibrations of imbalance, to watch the gauges and keep a keen lookout – from the inside – for what’s needed on the outside.
Know that your intuition is powerful and your breath like fuel.
Listen up,
fill up,
tune up,
and rev up.
Make wise choices and the road is yours.
The ocean rolls in and out, finding a rhythm in the irregular beat of its waves on the shore, a consistency in the inconsistency.
It asks that I bend more, stay more still, listen more closely, find my entry, consider a way to dive in while still feeling my feet.
Restless…rejecting…beautiful…inciting…matching breath to motion.
Sometimes steady and full, sometimes roaring in…sometimes barely there.
Here together, a push and pull of synchrony.
Even in the struggle you connect me with my breath.
You awaken my senses.
You remind me what it means to exist and give me permission to settle into my unsettledness.
It is a lovely and intricate dance this dance of the head and heart.
The heart leads with what it knows. The head leads with what it believes it knows.
The heart lets the music guide its movement. The head responds to the beat.
The head counts the steps and searches the archives to apply with precision each detail. The heart feels every past movement, every tumble just the same and invites imperfection in its flow.
The head seeks the answers…the road map.
The heart sets down its notes and score card, turning its attention to the winding road before it.
The head consults the master plan while the heart embodies it.
Both are wickedly talented on the dance floor. Together their dance is spectacular.
But I do often wonder why it is that the head takes the lead so often.
I breathe in, filling with the life force that moves me into every adventure, like the climbing of a roller coaster to the peak of its highest rail.
I teeter at the top, momentarily suspended in the gap of the breath the frozen space of fear.
And then I soften, surrender, and remember I am bigger than the gap. When I become bigger in the space of fear, fear becomes a place of play.
I can wade, jump, dive, trickle or race through the gap, inviting the breath to meet me at the other side. As I move more fully into each turn, each bend and dip in the rail, I become bigger and bigger with every breath.
In the bigness, I am fluid and free. There, in that space, I cannot help but smile in the excitement I find in being me…in breathing excitement into fear.
Every day, I tenderly pluck and sort the unwanted guests between the treasured plants in the garden of this life of mine. I carefully reach between the stalks and flowers I choose to keep and arrange them all just so.
And, even with the most careful attention, I never leave my garden without scrapes, brush marks and bruises.
Yes, some of the most treasured plants in my garden have thorns. I move with particular sensitivity around them lest they snag my flesh. And somehow even as they cut me, I am still able to see their beauty and feel their special worth. They reach out and brush against me as if they just want to touch, to say “isn’t this all so grand that we are here?!”
It is at that moment when I am wounded but still capable of loving – even those plants with thorns – that I recognize that this coexistence is the essence of thriving.
