This week I was cruising through my chores. My trip to Madrid had put me behind. I had so much to do. Several weeks worth of laundry had piled up and I had no work clothes. Max was running out of socks. In a burst of efficiency, I threw a load in and went up to make dinner. After homework and bath and bedtime I went down to move the clean clothes to the dryer. I put them in, turned the dial, hit the button…and then nothing. The dryer coughed a little. Strained a bit. But it would not spin. Incedulous, I tried again. And again. I checked plugs and connections and then, exhausted I gave up. A good nights sleep would do me well. I thought the same would be true for my dryer.
The next morning I was peppy. By the dryer still made the same cough. Still whined before growing silent.
We are on a very tight budget. I have practically no cushion for moments such as these. And sure enough, when I checked, other emergencies which had come earlier had eaten what little was left. I could not pay to have someone come and fix my dryer. Not now. It would have to wait.
This was not such a crisis. I delight in line dried clothes. They can be stiff perhaps but there is nothing like the smell of the outdoors, of the crisp air, on my shirts, my pajamas, my pillowcases. When Juan and I went to Mexico, I handwashed and line dried everything I brought with me on my last day and then rationed those clothes for months–breathing in the scent of a place I loved so much, a scent that did not come from mechanical dryers but from clothes hanging, swaying and drying in the Oaxacan breeze. I returned home from every trip with the intention of hanging a clothes line but each time convenience and lack of time got in my way.
This morning, as my anxious mind worried over bills, and dirty clothes and the impossibility of having time to wait for a repairman even if I could scrape together the cash, the simplest of solutions jumped to my brain. $10 for clothesline and clothes pins, sunshine and winter breezes, a reduced gas and electric bill, and sunshine infused clothes.
I recently read that Universe is always doing its best with what it has at its disposal. Always trying to arrange the moments, no matter how chaotic and sad and tragic for the best possible outcome. I could stomp my feet at our bad luck or I could hang a clothes line and delight in sundried clothes.
I chose the later.
What crazy, horrible, inconveniences have lead you to a place you always wanted to go? This wide eyed dreamer is searching and would love to hear your stories.
For the last several years, it has been my New Year’s ritual. Encouraged by the lovely Jen Lemen, I pick just one word to be my anthem for the coming year. Its a word that holds in it all the boundless possibility of 365 fresh clean days ahead. Its a word to whisper to myself as I wake up. A word to help me channel what my heart needs, a touchpoint to keep it front and center.
In 2007, as I was recovering from the break-up of my marriage, my word was RENEWAL. In 2008, as I moved forward beyond that crisis my word was BLOSSOM. Last year, as I began the process of a strangely beautiful, challenging inner journey I chose the word TRUST. In all these cases, I found that the year magically delivered the lessons, experiences and opportunities that allowed me to sink into that word. These experiences did not always present as I imagined they might, but they unfolded perfectly nonetheless. My word becomes a prayer, a mantra, a device that immediately allows me to access deep wisdom and cherished dreams.
My experience with my one word has been so powerful that choosing it this year felt both thrilling and terrifying. But a word, is just that, a word. It is not magical alone. It is my awareness, my love, my action in its name that makes it so.
Nevertheless, at the end of last year, I sat in a driveway with the same friend who gave me this exercise, fretting over an appropriate choice. I told her that this year I needed to learn about ease, not the kind of ease that is associated with lying around eating chocolate while someone else cleans, but the ease that comes from grace, lack of resistance and effortless motion. I wanted to glide through the next year, instead of the “stumble stumble trip” sort of hike that many of my adventures have resembled. This is the year I want to learn to get out of my own way and see what develops when I drop my fears and excuses. This is the year I want to learn to stop assuming everything will be an uphill battle and to enjoy what unfolds effortlessly when I let me be me.
She barely missed a beat. SKATE.
What?….SKATE
I am a bit wobbly on skates. Once upon a time I knew how to glide about, but now I can be tentative and restrained at the rink. Old bones, many years away from the ice, they have all made me a bit wary. Max skates circles around me while I take frequent breaks to rest my weary ankles. I wondered if this word would really do. Sure, SKATE speaks of speed and grace and forward motion–but for others, not for me!
But then I remembered something that happened last February when Max and I went to New Hampshire. My friend Marcy loaned me her hockey equipment and we took to a frozen pond for a pick up game with our boys. I skated on hockey skates for the first time in my life. I tripped and fell and then I started to try things I hadn’t ever tried before because with all that padding, the fear had gone away. It was silly and glorious and while it didn’t transform me as a skater I learned enough that it changed how I approached the rink next time. Looking back on it, that Sunday afternoon was one of the most joyful, light and spirited days of my year. It was a day of laughter, of learning and of –yes–ease. That feeling was exactly what I was searching for this year. That bright blue Sunday afternoon feeling, when the feeling of grace and possibilty came my way, when falling stopped phasing me but instead became a teacher and trying became doing.
Skate is a word that speaks to me of letting go. Skate speaks to me of childhood, and crystal blue skies and forward motion. Skate speaks of speed and abandon and laughter.
So SKATE, I choose you as my word. I welcome you in and hope you bring a sense of ease, grace, fluidity. I know you will bring falls, and bumps, but I will remember they are teachers and like my hockey suited self, I will bounced up from them unharmed. In fact, they will make me laugh. I look forward to gliding along and seeing where we go together, you and I.
Now, you, tell me…What is your word for 2010? What do you wish to welcome in to your year?
2009, oh its hard to believe you are coming to a close. Feels like just yesterday that you were dawning. You have been a year of quiet shifts and changes. Nothing big happened this year, and yet, so much happened. And its all been big.
This was the year that I learned, really learned that no one knew what I should do better than my own sweet self. This was the year that I learned that no one will love me quite the way that I could love myself. This was the year, that I learned to embrace stillness and to sit, however uncomfortably in the quiet. This was the year that I learned to retreat. And to trust that it would all be OK in the end.
This is the year that I lost so many of my illusions about fairy tale endings. This is the year I learned to let go. I grieved so many friendships this year. Friends who died, friends who moved, friends who simply left or stopped showing up. This is the year that I stopped resisting Grief and finally accepted that nothing I would do would ever hold her permanently at bay. No amount of tap dancing, no amount of good girl work ethic would keep her away. She would exist always, along with her twin sister Joy. One could not be without the other. Welcome teacher, come have tea.
This is the year that I finally decided to accept my big old heart. I stopped telling myself the story that she was too much and decided to go ahead and let her feel, spill out and be overflow. I let her love. Even when that love was messy. Even when, especially when, that love went unreturned.
This is the year I learned again that life doesn’t have to be perfect or smooth or unblemished to be beautiful.
This is the year I returned again to the dance studio. And I realized that nothing makes me happier, and I wondered why I ever dare stay away.
This is the year I started to ask for what I needed and found that miraculously, mysteriously it always arrives, in completely unexpected packages. I relearned the delight of a childhood Christmas morning again and again and again. This is the year I became awake to all the signs in my life, the signs that point me home, the signs that remind me I am loved, the signs that I really know what to do.
This is the year that I jumped into an abyss, not knowing where it would all lead. This is the year that I never found out, but learned to ride the not knowing. Learned to accept I might not ever know. This is the year that I learned to accept the out of control feeling that comes with mystery and adventure. This is the year I sank into my insecurity, financial and otherwise. This is the year that the reality of all I had experienced the last 40 years hit.
I forgive myself for all those days this year that I lost faith. I forgive myself for all those days I curled up into a ball and gave up, too exhausted to give a hoot. I forgive myself for letting myself be held back by fear, for making excuses, for going back to sleep. I forgive myself for not writing, not playing my guitar, not creating, not trying. I forgive myself for not being inspired, for being blase, for disconnecting. It happens.
Yes, 2009, you were quite a year. You held many gifts. You brought many lessons. You were difficult and wintery. You were small and quiet but powerful and transformative and one day I will be like you.
And now, dear 2009, with all the love and gratitude in my heart, I declare you complete.
Welcome 2010, you round, yummy year you–here I come!
Inspired by this superhero, my soul sister Kaiya, the icey glaze on my lawn this morning and one really good plate of pancakes.
Before I post again, I needed to stop to offer a huge thank you to the many people who have stopped by this blog, emailed, called, or facebooked in the last few days. Your kind, loving, beautiful words are a gift.
The overwhelming emotion for this week has been great gratitude for the gift of Jenni that we all shared, that indeed we all continue to share. Jenni lives on in all us, whenever we reach out to stranger, whenever we are courageous enough to be raw, and real, when we speak truth to power, when we find humor, grace and beauty in the most difficult of situations. Jenni lives on when we hug our children, when sing at the top of our lungs, when we make our art (whether it is with paper, dance, music, paint, fabric, clay or words). Jenni is with us when we cry at night, when we worry about our babies, when we contemplate the suffering in our homes, our communities, the world. Jenni is with us when we giggle with our girlfriends, when we pour “a cuppa” and sit for tea with our sisters, when we tell our stories over and over again in the hopes that we will find healing there. If we follow our stories, we will find as that in the end, there is only love–love so big and messy and wide and deep. That was the lesson of Jenni.
I have been holding a small moment of silence over here for Jen, until she be laid to rest. But now it is time to keep doing what Jenni and I enjoyed doing together–writing, connecting, watching, witnessing, living and growing.
I will. I will. I will. Everyday I will.
Will you?
I am in the process of becoming more and more the person I already am, the person I have already been. I am on a journey that takes me home, right here to myself.
I recently had the occasion to hold a new born baby.
Babies are funny creatures.
They are completely capable of receiving love, deep love in all its forms without reservation. They receive it all effortlessly–the practical (food, diaper changes), the physical (nursing, cuddles), the smiles and cuddles what ever comes their way. They don’t think about it, or question the motive. They don’t wonder if they deserve it. They just take it in–indeed their very survival depends on it.
Likewise, babies are capable of bringing forth joy and gratitude, simply by their being. They open up spaces of lightness. They can make the grouchiest old fart smile. They aren’t trying to prove anything. They don’t yet know that there is anything to prove.
We are brought into this world to accept love and to bring forth joy and gratitude. We don’t ever need to learn how. It is who we are. Inherently.
We then spend much our young lives forgetting everything we ever needed to know about ourselves, and then, if we are lucky, wise or awake, we spend another portion of our lives forgetting the forgetting and just coming back home to ourselves. and to the perfect way we always knew how to be before a series of somethings false made us question what we know so deep we need not language to express it.
On Thursday night I went out to hear live music. I have wanted to see Yo La Tengo live for years. I promised myself I would do it before I turned 40. I managed the task with just hours to spare.
After a great show, I was driving home with my friend. I suddenly looked at the clock as my chest started to tighten. It was 11:15. “Forty-five minutes” I said.
“Until what?” he asked.
I looked at him incredulously. “Until I turn 40.” This was so huge to me, so big. I could not believe that someone so close to me had not noticed.
The trip home was excruciating. I hadn’t hired a babysitter. My ex was at home with Max and I knew that I would face him as the clock struck midnight. Worse yet, when he left I would face the absence of him.
The last ten years were pressing in on me with each passing minute. I got home, kicked out Juan with a thanks and a wave, and sat down with 10 minutes left.
I turned 30 without much flourish, drama or even thought. I was a work-aholic then. I was on a business trip. I came home to a sweet, but rather uneventful weekend with my husband. Turning 30 meant being a grown up and I was ready to embrace responsibility and stability.
Over the next ten years, I was swept along, along a career path, a partnership, and eventually into motherhood. I struggled with post-partum depression. I grew as a mother, I watched my marriage fall apart, I came to peace with work, I learned to be alone, I developed a community, I lost my faith and gained it over and over again. I found my heart, I found my soul, I gave up faking it and embraced my messy but authentic self, stopped looking for the ending and just immersed myself in the adventure.
And at 11:50, I sat alone as I felt myself standing at some kind of doorway, gateway, a new beginning or maybe just a continuation of the same old road. It felt heavy and strange and bigger than normal.
I was glad Juan left. I needed to face this myself. Even more than that, I needed him not to be there. Yet, to be honest, I felt as lonely as I did the first night that Juan walked out of my house. I cried. Not because I was turning 40. I cried for grief, and joy, for all that had passed over the last 10 years. Then I blessed those memories and blew them like kisses out the window.
Eventually I slept. And then I woke up. And it was a new day.
My 40th birthday fell on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It was also the 18th day of the month. In Hebrew, the word for Chai or “Life” and the word for the number 18 are the same. When the new year falls on the 18th, she told me, it is especially lucky. For me to turn 40 on such a day…is triply lucky. A blessing of the most wonderful kind.
And so, it was perfectly appropriate that I would spend my 40th birthday, gathered around the table with dear friends, passing the challah and dipping apples into honey. Instead of blowing out birthday candles, I would light them.
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Barukh atah Adonai E1oheinu, melekh ha’olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat
Blessed are you, Lord God, who brings Light into the World, into the Universe.
Never have those words meant more to me. As I lit the candles I understood. All the generations before seemed to touch me on my shoulder. Bring the light into the house. Bring the light into the world.
I cannot help but believe that I am standing at at the foot of a mountain range, both magical and magnificent. There is no other way to go but walk, step forward, trust my life, trust the path.
Let it carry me home. To the light.
The first time I was aware of it was almost 20 years ago. I was standing in a friends living room in Georgetown, a hoity toity DC neighborhood. I was visiting from Houston and talking to a woman I knew in college at some friend’s engagement party. While I told her about my experiences as a teacher she told me about becoming a nurse. And in the pit of my stomach I knew. “Yeah…THAT’s what I should have done. That should have been me.” I was flooded suddenly with awareness and knowing–a sense that came from almost nowhere that told me I should have become a healer and with a slight sinking feeling rarely experienced by the young, I felt I may have missed my calling.
As the years went on, this uncomfortable feeling returned in the most unlikely of times and places. Long before I would even consider having a child, I became obsessed with midwifery. While I excelled at my chosen career, while my work felt meaningful and important, while I felt I was making a mark somewhere good and important, I never felt 100% at home. I began to dream of healing of the most ancient kind–the wise women healing of our ancestors.
I read everything there was to read on the subject of birthing babies. I pinned down any midwife who would talk to me for hours while I asked thousands of questions. I searched through catalogs and plotted training and career paths and dreamed in unrealistic and silly ways about how I would one day join the league of those who hold space so something beautiful could be born. I called it my fantasy career–and spoke about it longingly as the thing I would do when I retired or when I was old and grey. I spoke of it as the thing I might try if I could do it all over again.
But it never let me go, the crazy notion that I am meant for something else. It popped up its head in countless ways. Even when I wasn’t taking this life seriously, it was dreaming me.
About 2 years ago I realized that it was less about birthing babies and more about birthing hope. It was about being with people through their dark days of pain and touching them with compassion and giving them permission to heal. As I emerged from the fog of my own divorce and a battle with migraines and what some had called chronic fatigue, I knew it was about witnessing birth of a different kind.
Over the course of years, of healing from my own hurts–both physical, emotional and spiritual, I have explored various modalities. Western medicine is truly miraculous but I am drawn to the old ancient healing traditions, like acupuncture. These have touched my life in ways that feel down right miraculous. I started out going for my migraines. While we have made progress with my beastly headaches, the reality is that something else has shifted in me within that treatment room. I have felt fear drop away. I have let anxiety drift. I have woken up to lessons in my life. I have been able to settle more into the present. I have felt my body and spirit shift together to a place of more wholeness.
As I have witnessed friends and loved ones suffer from pain of all sorts, my hands have itched for needles.
The uneasy disquieting feeling has turned into an alarm. It has become a child tugging on my sleeve relentlessly. I want to be there to help hold the space so others too can let go of their pain, heal their souls and bodies. I want to help women and men alike birth, not babies but their better healthier selves. I want to hold space so something healing can be born.
I know, with all my being, that this healing work, is what I am meant to do. Yes. There. I have said it out loud. Its scary to declare it to the world this way. Especially since it seems so impossible, improbable, impractical.
For the last 10 months or so I have started to adjust my thinking to hold the possibility that maybe I could really do this in some way shape or form. For the most part I sat quietly with these dreams, speaking them outloud only occasionally, only tentatively. I tenderly rocked the vision of me as healer like a sickly newborn babe. I wasn’t sure she would thrive, but I held her close to my heart and nursed her anyway. She has now grown to the point that I know she will be healthy vibrant…and dare I speak it…real.
Standing between me and training as a healer is a mountain range of challenges. The one that looms largest, looking unscalable and impassable is the mountain that represents at least a couple of hundred of thousands of dollars to pay for tuition and to support Max and I while I study. I have no idea how or where these resources will come from as I struggle to make ends meet every month without books and school. Even if I could find the cash for tuition, I have no idea how I will add studying to an already overcrowded life of fulltime work and single parenting. I know major changes will have to occur in my life to make space for this dream but I can’t quite figure them out. I see the path but truth be told, I have no idea how the hell I am going to get on it.
At another time in my life, this lack of clarity may have caused me to give up in despair, resigning myself to my almost good enough life with my good enough career and the choices I have made to this point. I would have held my knees close to my chest and told myself that it is enough and I should be happy with my beautiful child, my lovely community, my meaningful work. But this is now and I am no longer content with resignation. I am feeling fierce and warrior like, even though I am not exactly sure what that really means.
I know I am a healer and that it is only a matter of time before I can acquire the tools of my trade. I am declaring the start of my journey, even though I can’t quite see the path ahead. And somehow, declaring it here feels important for reasons I don’t really understand. But I am trusting this instinct and my need to tell you this story.
How is it going to all turn out? I have no idea. This story is an epic mystery. Will it happen on top of my current career, along side it, in place of it? How will I stitch the resources together? Where will I end up doing this work? What is the Universe going to require of me? What pound of flesh will I be forced to pay? What blessings will find me on the way? What marvelous and scary destinations await me?
I can’t wait to find out.
If you too are curious how this all turns out drop me a note in the comments here or by email at meg at megcasey dot com. As I set off on this journey however slow or rapid it may be, I am seeking a community of fellow travelers who will help me navigate this path and who will hold me accountable to this life that is dreaming me.
This is the time of year that finds me in the garden. Every morning, I am distracted from my march out the door by an inspection of flower beds. What has come up? What new thing is showing itself? What new beginning has announced itself? Max always has to yell from the car, “Mom…Mommmmm……Come….on…We are going to be late.” I am dreamy as I stumble to the car, unable to take my eyes off the soil. It is fascinating to me–this explosion of new life.
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Yet, when it is time to work in my garden, I find that the majority of the work is about clearing. Removing. Pulling up weeds, tilling the soil, turning over the ground. Clearing the space so that something new and beautiful can grow. I spend so little time actually planting. No, most of my work is about picking up dead leaves. Picking up the sticks brought down by the rain. Pruning the azaleas and the roses. Cutting back. Cleaning out. Sweeping up. Creating space so something new can be born. Isn’t this really the work of a gardener?
There is a spot in my garden where I usually plant annuals. Impatients or pansies–something that will immediately add color. This year, for a variety of reasons I don’t understand, I decided not to do this. I bought a couple packs of seeds, checking only that the light would be OK. Without paying much attention, Max and I dumped them onto the freshly tilled soil. We raked over a bit more soil and waited as it rained.
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This week our beloved housemate is leaving us. Its hard to believe it is so, but it is. It is an occasion of excitement for it marks a wonderful new beginning for her. Our home was a safe place of refuge when she needed it most. Our house was a transition. But now she has all that she needs to make it on her own–legal status, a job, resources, a community. The apartment half a mile down the street, up high on the top of the building, with the tiny kitchen and big windows, it is the right place for her to be now. It is the first home she will call her own. And this is a miracle. Something new is being born for her.
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And I know that something new will be born for us too. My dear friend Kaiya tells me that the Universe abhors a vacuum. When space is opened up, something new will grow. And I am holding onto this truth fiercely. It is a great comfort.
As we transition from housemates to friends, there is an ache in this empty place in our heart’s house where she used to be with her lilting African voice and the smells of her yummy cooking, in the place where she used to look at me with eyes that really saw. And yet, I know that out of this emptiness something new will grow. Letting go makes me sad and if I am completely honest, the mystery of what will grow up in this place makes me a little uncomfortable. But it is a discomfort I will sit with. But I have long ago given up guessing. Whatever is next will surprise me, that is for sure.
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For weeks now I have been churning on these thoughts, in the garden, with the moving boxes. I am feeling it in other places of my life too. Colleagues are moving on, our organization is transitioning, friendships that are dear to me are tranforming. I know that in my heart too something is giving way, releasing, letting go. I am letting so much go so something new and marvelous can be born. It is sad and scary and also full of wonder…
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I am drawing on the lessons of my garden. If I clear the space, something beautiful can be born. There is a cycle to this life we live, a cycle of letting go of what blossomed and filled us last, clearing the space and waiting with an empty patch of soil.
I feel I am stepping into an empty field, freshly tilled. I am saying yes to whatever will grow here in this open space in my heart, in my life. Yes without knowing where it will take me. Yes without a plan. Yes without knowing what the next step will be.
This Christmas was the first Christmas where it happened. Max sat, surrounded by a mountain of carefully picked out gifts and cried. Santa Claus and I, we had failed to deliver him the Christmas he had hoped for–or rather the gifts on his list he had so desperately wanted.
I took a deep breath, and realized that this was a moment to teach. Teach about disappointment and recovering from it. Teach about the bounty of gifts that he had, how lucky he was. Odette told him stories about what children in Rwanda get for Christmas. Slowly but surely his big old tears stopped falling and he started to happily, joyfully play with the gifts he had received, suddenly aware of the magic they represented.
Looking back at our Christmas now, I can’t help but see a powerful lesson beginning to unfold for me too.
Ironically I began my winter by teaching the lesson I would spend all winter learning. About the trickiness of hope and attaching myself to vision of what my future happiness looks like. About the disappointment that comes from yearning and longing and about how I lose sight of the gifts in my life when I am looking for that one elusive cherished desire. And I learned this winter about how while hope can leave me drunk on possibility of how wonderful it might all be one day, the hangover is an empty feeling and the sneaking suspicion that maybe I am not really quite enough.
Yeah, this winter, in very small ways hope kicked my ass. And I saw hope for the sneaky character it is, something that makes me feel warm and fuzzy now and again but something which can turn every day into the Christmas where I sit surrounded by gifts sobbing.
I have to admit, as spring time images of hope come fluttering into view, I have not done a good job receiving them openly. I have wanted to scream at the top of my lungs–OH NO PEOPLE….DON’T YOU DARE COME TALKING TO ME ABOUT HOPE. DON’T YOU SEE HOW TRICKY AND DESTRUCTIVE IT IS? YOU THINK I AM GOING TO GET SUCKED IN AND SET MYSELF UP FOR DISAPPOINTMENT AND MISS ALL THE GIFTS IN MY LIFE? YOU MAY BE A SUCKER…BUT I AM NOT!
And yet, something tugged on me and my grouchy, self-righteous ways. Tugged on me like a little child pulling on my sleeve. The child that does not give up, saying “mom…mom….mom…” over and over again until I listened, maybe a little reluctantly.
What if HOPE isn’t about the future? What if HOPE is not another word for longing? What if HOPE isn’t about holding onto something that hasn’t yet materialized? What if we have been misusing the word all this time? What if we have somehow bent it out of shape? What if all this time that I was “holding onto HOPE” I was clutching something else?
What if HOPE is about the present? What if HOPE is about recognizing the beauty and the joy even in the most mundane and ordinary moment. What if HOPE is about finding love in the midst of horrible pain and just focusing in like a laser on it–not because it predicts a better day coming, but simply because it is beautiful and perfect exactly as it is? What if HOPE is about seeing the possibility in now? The action I can take right now that opens up a whole new way of being, regardless of where it takes me? That makes joy and love present right now–regardless of what happens next? What if HOPE is about savoring every moment of life for the gifts and the joy and even the challenges and lessons that it brings?
What if I had it all wrong all these years? Well…what a wonderful time to start again, I suppose.
These are some of the things that I have been thinking about all winter…that I have been turning over in my head as spring has started to bloom.
Jen Lemen and Stephanie Roberts have this lovely project called Picture Hope. They have a proposal to travel the world looking for images of hope and capture them on film. They have been voted as the number one most popular idea and now they are going with 19 other ideas to a final adjudication. I am so proud of my friend Jen and her soulsister Stephanie. I suppose it would be easy to start hoping that it all comes together and that they win the big prize. Truth is, I know that they may or may not win in the end and I can’t let my little fragile heart go wishing. Instead I will simply sit in the joy that through daring to see the possibility and take a step forward to challenge us all to see hope–not as something abstract and future oriented but something that can be captured with a lens they are already living the dream.
“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
-Henry Miller
Ever since I saw this quote on my friend Kaiya’s refridgerator, I have been rolling it over in my mouth, tasting it, savoring it. I have been sitting with it and looking it in the eye. I have been sipping it like tea, taking it in bit by bit and letting it wash over me. I am still letting it seap into the cracks in my heart.
This requires me to be very still. And not to think. It requires me to walk and put my feet firmly on the ground and throw my head to the sky and breathe in the air, the rainy, misty, cold spring air. It requires me to play a song badly and to hear all the rough, muffled notes without judgment. To laugh heartily. It requires me to gaze into the most beautiful pair of blue eyes I have ever seen and simply see them, to recognize them not as ancient and old and from lifetimes ago, not to wonder about their past or their future, but for what they are now at this moment. Beautiful. Breathtakingly beautiful.
The other day my friend Jen stopped me in the hallway at school. “How are you?” she asked me. She knew the answer. I am working through demons and walking on a tightrope. I am perfectly fine and falling apart all at the same time. I am wrestling with concepts so simple they are revolutionary. Concepts that are both turning my insides out and stunning me with their obvious plain-facedness.
Simply put, I am wrestling with the nature of hope and love. Or rather I am awash in the wonder of these things. Honestly, on most days I am confounded and have stopped thinking I need to have all the answers. To simply sit with the questions seems to be enough, I guess.
