Marvelous Monday

“I’m unwilling, unable, and unenthusiastic…”, until I am. I cannot do things the way others want me to do them. And yet, I try. “I don’t know what this means, but I have to explore….I’ve gotta know, have to know and own what I know….” I’m watching Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. I’m thinking about the soft moving edges of the ways I am in Union with Muse, Creator, Life, energy and all the times I am not. Mind blaming others for the long periods of the tumult of the decisions, language, tone, actions of others, that slam the door shut on this contact that was once constant and now, like a dream I once had. Getting back, doesn’t work, isn’t working. How do I start? Comparing when I am willing, able, and enthusiastic to the past and to my imagined or real current expectations and those of others is Killing me. Suffocating weight. Awareness is like snapping on a light. I want to say, staying in the light takes the same ages it took to leave that light. But, I do not want this to be true. I consider that I think I also believe that if only I do this or that, I’ll get the awareness and get to Keep it, in the perfect form of my desire….forever. I’m laughing at my mind, not in derision, but in mirth. I can float, but I cannot surf. Yet. I seem to recall the enchantment of the explore was the ‘goal’ for me. I moved away from that and am mudbathing in outcomes, a grade, enoughness again. That peony does not have to consider these things. It simply IS. I like that.

Morning Trip (345)

“Meditation is not just blindly following whatever the person next to you does. To meditate you have to be skillful and make good use of your intelligence.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger, Wisdom for Cooling the Flames

Morning Trip (256)

“Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain – not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.”

–Mary Oliver, First Snow

Morning Trip (250)

“I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creek’s surface. The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed. The breeze is the merest puff, but you yourself sail headlong and breathless under the gale force of the spirit.”
–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Trapped or Protected

enclosed in your fist
i was safe
what if
i feel abused
and then you sigh
and you carefully open a space between two fingers
and i peer out
and i see
that I am being
held
up
close
in the light
of the sun
there is no ground beneath me
there is no where to run
there is not yet
any safe space
to be put down
–elisabeth connelley

I forgot somehow to run and to play around and around, up and then down laughing at you watching me as the flame rises and I float off in union. Maybe I can remember how. Please forgive me. I cannot forgive myself. At least…not yet.