The fog is in today, a blanket enclosing a circulation of an ecosystem, our own, embodied in more.
Last night I learned of the passing of a friend. I am with the words of Rilke:
“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”
Each day my inbox contains a covey of inspiring quotes. I’m hoisted, flown, and carried on words to open and release. Today something different comes, a quote by Francis Picabia, a French painter:
Our heads are round so thoughts can change direction.
I think of trees, open 360 degrees.
I’ve been in a pause of silence. I caught a cold from my grandson and that has pulled me into an inner landscape. It’s odd to have survived the “pandemic” and then be caught up in the inner journey of contemplation and analysis of retreat that healing invites.
As a child, the evening before this day we made baskets of construction paper and filled them with candy and flowers, which early in the morning we hung on the doorknobs of our neighbors.
This morning I’m looking out on beauty, a half moon bright in a blue sky. My husband and Friend Skunk met this morning and each calmly went their own way. Two deer visit our yard in the early morning hours these days.
I’ve been thinking about impermanence. A friend suggests writing quotes I love on a piece of paper torn in a strip and folded into a circle like a little boat. Float the boat in water and watch the words and possibly paper dissolve.
I anchor that with these words of David Whyte:
Reality met on its own terms demands absolute presence, and absolute giving away, an ability to live on equal terms with the fleeting and the eternal, the hardly touchable and the fully possible, a full bodily appearance and disappearance, a rested giving in and giving up; another identity braver, more generous and more here than the one looking hungrily for the easy, unearned answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
This weekend in a Sensory Awareness workshop with Miren Salmeron I felt the flow and connection of blood, organs, and bones, as though I was a tide pool, and all this movement and changing, flowing densities was happening within me. There was nothing for me to do, no need to orchestrate. What a relief!
It was ease, compassion, kindness, reception, Love. I am an aquarium, though as a living organism, permeable, not glass.
The experience felt like pregnancy where we allow expansion and birth.
Thich Nhat Hanh in Walk Like a Buddha wrote:
When the Buddha walked, he walked without effort. He just enjoyed walking. He didn’t have to strain, because when you walk in mindfulness, you are in touch with all the wonders of life within you and around you.
Thich Nhat Hanh gave us this poem.
Breathing in,
I calm my body.
Breathing out,
I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment.
When we pause and spread our arms like wings on a bird, or branches of a tree, we embrace and feel embraced. We’re pumped with air, given space, and when we smile, the muscles of the face, connected to the seventh cranial nerve, change the nervous system and our relationship with air, our vital nourishment and need.
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