Have you ever had a day where everything around you sparkled? Where everything was so vibrantly alive? Where there wasn’t even a question in your head about anything because you were simply alive, aware and awake?
That’s how yesterday was for me. Perhaps it was a combination of dance (my early-Sunday-morning ritual), brunch outside with beautiful friends, a crazy-gorgeous day in San Francisco with a temperature of 80+ degrees, and time spent cleaning my home and cooking good food. And, perhaps it was one-on-one time with my grandson on Friday, a time to just be with him and to see the remarkableness of his unique soul and how it already shines through at 3-years old.
What I know, deep in the belly, is the more I come home to this woman’s body, the more I know I belong to this earth. This body came out of the earth and it will return to the earth, and while I am alive in this body, to know I truly belong is to know I am part of the earth. When I know this, when what I am settles down into the body and fills the cells of the body, I am no longer thinking my way through life, I am alive and I see everything around me as the same unutterably beautiful aliveness.
Yesterday, I came across this brilliance by John O’Donohue (someone I tend to quote often as he was entirely wise):
“In the experience of beauty we awaken and surrender in the same act.”
Beauty isn’t what we are constantly told it is.
Beauty is the sacred appearing gloriously and unabashedly as the form into which it is born.
And when we experience beauty, this appearance of spirit enlivening matter, even if just for a split second, we remember, we awaken to our true nature and we surrender to this nature all in the same moment.
One place I so often experience this is when I commune with flowers, especially when the light flows through their petals. Just last night, as I was walking home from the grocery store, I passed by my neighborhood florist shop and stopped to look in the windows. All last week, the shop was filled with at least six different kind of peonies. Big, huge bunches of peonies lined their old oak tables. I took photos. I sat and just looked, while tears filled my eyes. The proprietress knows me, now, and she came over for a second just to stand with me as we both admired the fullness of beauty we were witnessing. But last night, the shop was closed and the only peonies left were those that filled two vases sitting in the front window. They’d been left in the front window for the weekend, just to delight the senses of passersby like me.
These peonies in the window were in their last stages of blooming, with the petals already a little bit translucent, as happens when the decay begins. I was captivated by the mix of such intense beauty and short life span…how for just a short, short time these blossoms poured their uniqueness forth into the world, only to soon return to the earth.
We are like this. It’s what makes life so precious and amazing…the luminosity, and the numinous presence that looks out from behind your eyes.
We belong here because we are this. It has taken me all my life to come home…55 years of wandering to realize I am home. This body is my vessel of belonging.
My gift is to help guide women to come home to this body, right here, right now, and to open to this deeply erotic field in which we live, and create, and love. To know we belong here and have such beautiful gifts to share with this world that is hungry for our wisdom, our nature and our love is the gift that is waiting to be received.
This is the feminine in real life, and it is deeply practical. We can’t fully give our gifts until we are fully here. When we are fully here in the body, we are no longer fighting being fully alive, no longer fearing what might come in the next moment.
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And, you?
What is your gift to give in this life?
How fully do you feel you belong here, on this earth?
What can help bring you home to this knowing that you belong and are an intrinsic part of the life that is breathing you?
Take some time today to notice what brings you home into your body, into your vessel of belonging. Notice when you are already here, already aware of the aliveness of life. And, notice if there is resistance to being fully here.
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I’ve included this amazingly sensual song from yesterday’s dance (thank you, Claire!). I hope you enjoy it.
Jericho by Weekend Players (Pursuit of Happiness, ’03)
The lyrics speak to what I’ve written here. When our senses are filled with life, with Source, with what we really are, we see things as new, as continually coming into existence and then back into non-existence.
this song has very special meaning to me, which i will share when i see you in July xxx
Do you think the homecoming you describe comes for many women as a function of time? I keep circling back to the wish to feel more embodied, and while I know the conscious moves I make to help the process along make a difference, I keep having this feeling like I can’t fast forward this thing. Like I’m at a certain developmental place where longing and the visceral experience of NOT-home, a lot of the time, are my teachers. I wish it were another way… so my question in truly sincere.
Kristin,
I don’t think I could say what it comes from, except to feel everything fully. Everything. Yes, you can’t fast forward it AND you can also notice the subtle ways you believe you aren’t yet home. I know, sometimes it feels like the longest journey we have to travel is down into our own bodies.
Trust that everything that comes your way is in some way serving this coming home and open to receiving it all. Not the easiest thing, yet it can be the touchstone that serves you.
I can feel the sincerity of your question and your desire.
Love,
Julie
Mmmm…yes. Your post is a timely reminder to just take a moment and enjoy being in my body, now, sitting on this chair, slightly hungry, turning to look at my cat sleeping and the slightly weather battered garden.
sounds like a lovely moment, Jane.