Aimless

After concentrating my energy with great, intense focus, no longer doing so leaves me feeling unmoored. As if I were drifting aimlessly.

This gives me such discomfort! I would like to turn away from this unease immediately.

Nonetheless, I make a choice. I will sit with this discomfort.

And, sitting with it, I am reminded: “aimless” is either impossible, or it is intrinsic.

Impossible, intrinsic… in practical terms, both have the same effect.

I am, after all.

This awareness allows quietude within me. And from the quietude, something bubbles into my consciousness: the intention to remain vigilant, awake.

Photo credit: Colin Brough at RGBstock.com

My Calling

My calling. It’s been beckoning, across the years and the decades. And I, I have listened for it, sometimes attentively, sometimes distractedly. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes resisting, I have followed its echo through darkened forests of heavy undergrowth, have felt it push me through tight spots that open into sunlit vistas, its energy giving me momentum to jump across canyons.

I have been faithful to it, across the canyons of time and geography. I have been true, as true as my courage and determination have allowed (which are, admittedly, not unflagging).

After all these years of listening, answering, following, I would think I would have grasped it already, I would predict I would have reached it with a victorious celebration! At the least, I would expect it to have faded slowly to nothing.

But time has only made it stronger. And, lately, it is a command, issued in the imperative.

I can only respond. I want only to respond.

Although I name it “a calling,” although that is a noun, my Calling is a verb, in continuous movement, never attainable, achievable, finished.

And I give thanks for that, for the magnificent white waters it will compel me to navigate, and the shiny mountaintop lakes it will coax me to climb to. I give thanks for all that I will see and learn, that I would never even aspire to, but for my Calling.

Mountaintop Lake in El Cocuy, Colombia, Photo by Santiago Giraldo

In Full Alignment

Some days I am in full alignment.

I don’t know what that means, with my mind.

I feel it in the currents of energy streaming through me,

streaming from me,

like rivers… quiet on the surface,

but deep and strong, pulling boulders, underneath.

Some days I am in full alignment.

I don’t know what I know,

but I am aware of the luminous threads that connect me

to the butterflies closing their wings over a blossom,

to the roots of the trees, extending beneath the soil,

to the wisdom in the healing hands of a forgotten ancestor

tending to the pain of a child.

Some days I am in full alignment.

I don’t know who I am,

but I don’t need a name for myself,

I don’t need a name for the radiance breathing me.

I stand upright,

the heart of me open,

and I step forth.

Photo Credit: Graham Soult at RGBstock.com

Following Suffices

When I feel my Soul calling, I know I am ALIVE!  And this awakens me to joy and radiance.

Often, the call requires me to stretch beyond my comfort zone, to gather courage and strength, to remember my commitment to my Self in order to find the determination to respond.

Often, what I am called to do has direct and visible consequences, not just for me, but for those around me. I have been called to do community work, to hold rituals, to offer Reiki… none of those occur alone, in my room, behind closed doors.

Often, those consequences distract me, they become the reason for what I am doing.

And when they don’t look the way I expected, my confidence fails and I want to retrace my steps.

But that is a mistake.

I can’t find a “logic” to what my deepest Self asks me to do. I don’t really know why something calls to me with a power I cannot deny. I especially don’t know it when I experience the call.

I forget that it is the fact of responding to my Soul’s urgings that is the reason I answer the call: honoring my Self.

Doing so makes me expansive and generous. And I know, for the briefest instant, the white-hot, numbing cold, impossible-to-reconcile, utterly familiar Oneness.

That is reason enough.

Photo Credit: Sanja Gjenero at RGBstock.com

Birds

I visit the lakeshore on my own, to listen to the water and the wind in the trees, and to sit upon earth and pine needles again. I go for solitude and quiet, to be with my thoughts, and to open myself to what the sky and the leaves should care to share.

Birds! There are more of them than I ever saw. And such a variety of songs!

I see a brown-headed cowbird, of fluffy feathers, bouncing gently on a branch, issuing again and again a piercing call. A gaggle of red-winged blackbirds squabble and beat the trees above my head, louder than my children in a fight. A bird flashes past, dressed in iridescent blacks, with one yellow epaulet at its shoulder. And the tiny brown one, smaller than any I have seen, what is its name?

I have always loved birds, always nodded curtly at them, taken the long-way round in order not to disturb them, and sighed with awe at the most colorful of their kind. But I had never noticed so many of them, such a variety, in my vicinity.

Surely this same little stretch of forest, tripping up the dune to this same little bit of beach cannot have changed so much in the past few weeks.

No, it’s me, I changed.

Ever since Chiqui fancied himself a birdwatcher, a few weeks ago, and we have studied books with pictures and apps with songs; ever since he began a list of birds we have sighted, which he carries in his pocket; ever since I began teasing him gently when he bragged about seeing bird after bird of impossible species, right in our backyard… something changed for me.

I have learned from him. And so, I see more. And this quiet visit to the lake is richer than it ever was before.

So I stop to remind myself, as it goes amongst the trees, so does it go along the path I call my life.

Photo credit: Karunakar Rayker at Rgbstock.com

Gifts of Earth Day

Photo Credit: manumohan.com

Earth Day. I think of it as an opportunity to give back, collectively, to this home that nurtures us so generously.

But it is I who receives the gifts.

As I weed the foot of a tree that I am mulching, my fingers already tired of fighting the roots of grass, a man, walking his dog, stops to thank me for bringing beauty to his neighborhood park.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Chiqui patiently helping a much younger child (one who walked up to watch while his Little League scrimmage started) manage a rake.

At a greater distance, Golondrina, my shy and slow-to-warm-up child, is weeding with a woman I don’t know, and they are deep in conversation.

It is gifts like these that I receive, when my intention is to give.

Synchronized

I observe my days, and they are full of hurrying and scurrying, up and down, right and left… doing. I see a frenzied energy of effort and strain.

And yet, the observer within is slow and deliberate, synchronized to the gentle rhythm of breath and sunlight and bird song.

My awareness of her, that inner observer, does not slow the pace of my days, does not diminish what I find my hands tending to or my feet hurrying to. And yet, it makes all the difference.

photo credit: Scott M. Liddell at RGBstock.com

Blue Butterfly

I put my foot down on the path, on the dry clay, shaped with the hooves and paws and shoes that have walked here before I did. I am not attentive to the place, I simply take a step. My eyes are on the pine trees, and the hardwood forest beyond, my face is raised to the sky with its rolling breeze and gentle sunlight. I am not watching my feet.

But then you rise up from the ground, flashing your lilac blue wings before me and I am captivated.

You flutter, an uneven arc of pure grace.

I stand, still, breathless, watching you skim the blades of grass beside the path. I am alive, seeing you.

And then you alight, on the dry clay shaped by those that have walked here before me. And you close your wings.

I cannot see you any longer, the arresting blue of your wings folded against itself, out of sight. I cannot see you any longer, for the underside of your wings is the color of dry clay, with hills and vales that resemble the marks on the ground.

You do not move anew.

Nor do I, waiting to see again the iridescent magnificence. But there is only the yellow clay.

Did you slip away? Were you a dream of exceptional distinction?

The arresting blue of your wings is folded against itself and all I see is more clay.

Some Days

Some days, I awaken full of love and purpose, aware of all the gifts surrounding me, and eager to offer those within me.

Those days, the world is all wonder, and so am I.

And some days, I awaken so empty and lacking, so bare that I feel only shame and wish to hide, not only from the eyes beyond the walls, but from my own.

Those are the days of deepest surrender, when I acknowledge truly that I am nothing, that all thoughts are empty words I fill with wishes and air.

And so I turn myself over to the Great Mysterious and I am open to everything, even to nothingness.

If this is all, then, the flickering of my candle’s light before dawn is the deepest beauty and the raindrops pinging on the pane are the starkest truth.

And the gratitude that wells up within me is my very nature.

Something About Mist

When the mist lies suspended just above the lake and drapes itself over the limbs of the trees, I am transported to the home of my soul, La Finca, in the morning, when the world seems only to be awakening.

There is something about the mist, a silence, a quiet that sharpens my senses, my awareness of the world around me, so that I notice a crispness in the air, I feel the soil under my shoe releasing its scent.

I am awake, all of me is awake and there is an energy like fire running through me, reminding me: I am alive!

I am breath and flesh, mist and soil.