SHəˈnanəgənz/ (love these upside down əəəəəəəəəəəəəəəəəəəəəəs)
Shenanigans:
(def) a form of Silly or high-spirited behavior; mischief
I have to tell you, yesterday I was feeling shenaniganish. High-spirited. Downright silly. The energy was deliriously fun. Light. Playful. Happy. And completely grounded in reality, in the here of the only thing that exists. Now.
In my yoga class, as the teacher guided us in a short meditation, I found myself smiling, deeply smiling. You know the kind of smile that reaches up from down in your belly? The kind of smile that smiles you, where you know you are being smiled.
Sometimes spirit feels deep, beautiful, loving, compassionate.
Sometimes it feels like a pixie wanting to spread general mirth and silliness.
Sometimes it just laughs and laughs and laughs at the insanity of the ego’s circular substantiation of itself.
For some time now, I’ve felt like it’s so hard/wrong/inappropriate to be happy, playful, even shenaniganish in the face of so much pain and suffering in the world. You know what I mean?
This is a place of ‘stretch’ for me. Most people that know me see me as pretty serious. I can so totally be that.
I can also fall into this place of playfulness, and when I do I lap it up like a kitten given milk. It feels decadent and free.
Compassion, forgiveness, love, understanding, acceptance, fierceness, enough-is-enoughness are being called for, again and again. Yet, maybe, just maybe, what might bring some of those lovely things more available to us all is a bit of old-fashioned playfulness. Humor. Yes, even shenanigans – that high-SPIRITED behavior, or behaviour for all my canadian readers!
Just a thought… a thought that floated away with another belly smile.
I have learned lessons in playfulness from some of the poorest people in the world. I have giggled with a little girl in Bangladesh whose villages was mostly obliterated by a cyclone. I have danced in the setting sunlight with people in Ethiopia who have suffered from more frequent droughts and more days of hunger then we can imagine.
If these people can show pure, unadulterated joy in the midst of their circumstances, then we can/should too!
Heather, Thank you for this beautiful reminder. Your experiences brought me back to one I had in India. My friend Megan and I were walking along the Ghats in Varanasi, India. We came upon a group of young children engaged in their very real job of begging. This is what they do for a living, even at the young age of 8 or 9 or 10. We began to interact with them as children, by giggling, running and being generally silly. What followed was incredible. Their faces turned into radiant lights, with smiles from ear to ear. I imagine they found it funny for these two middle-aged women to be engaging them this way. I’m not sure what they thought, but what I experienced was pure joy from them. The joy of being just plain playful and silly and light. It was completely infectious.
Again, thank you for sharing your experiences. And your love.
Julie