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.
Lighten up on yourself, my dear friend.
You have not veered off the path.
Every apparent curve, every jagged edge, and every soft shoulder belongs to the path.
It’s all the path.
So, pack extra love and the balm of forgiveness and grace in your backpack
and set off
not for the journey
but as the journey.
Lighten up on yourself, my dear friend.
You have not veered off the path.
Every apparent curve, every jagged edge, and every soft shoulder belongs to the path.
It’s all the path.
So, pack extra love and the balm of forgiveness and grace in your backpack
and set off
not for the journey
but as the journey.
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.
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.
Love everyone and everything around you as if it were an arm, a leg, an extension of you.
We are all formed of the same chemicals and the same energy as everything around us. In that way we are all connected – we are one.
So, when we love beyond the perimeter of what we perceive as our structure and identity, we exist in a pure space of love…of ease…of freedom.
Oh, but wait…that would require pure love for oneself! Perhaps the true challenge lies in forming a steady stream of love for ourselves in order to feel pure connection through love beyond us.
Love requires truth. Truth requires fearless looking. Looking requires unconditional feeling. Feeling requires objective knowing.
So what if we open our eyes to see without fear, our mouths to speak authentically and empathetically, our hearts to feel without labels and judgement, and our minds to accept unlimited possibilities?
What if we can each find the “coeur”age to unconditionally love ourselves, to bathe ourselves in love?
Then, could we live as one love?
There are thinks I follow through on and thinks that follow me.
There are thinks that motivate and thinks that discourage.
There are thinks that build me up and thinks that crumble me to the ground.
There are thinks I think of doing and thinks that do on their own.
There are thinks I engage and thinks I avoid.
There are thinks I want to have and thinks that seem to taunt me.
There are thinks I hope to have and thinks that linger long past their usefulness.
It seems my thinks are here to stay.
Thankfully, I know they are not all that is me…they are just my thinks…just resting in a small crevasse of my being…
…and it is okay to let some get away.
Monday Mindfulness 