Fierce Times

Share

“There are many fierce moments in any one life span: times of turmoil, upheaval, challenge, and change. These fierce moments of grace are in many ways the most spiritually important moments of our lives.”
~ Adyashanti

Wood Line, a work of art by Andy Goldsworthy; photo by Julie Daley

Fierce times.

I’m personally in one of these fierce times.

I’ve left a relationship with a really lovely man. A man I love. I’ve left my home with him and moved into a new city, a city I’ve longed to live in for quite a while now.

Many have told me I’m courageous. I’m suppose there is some of that. And, to be honest, I simply could no longer stand the pain of avoiding what I knew was true in my heart.

It’s painful to avoid what gnaws at you during the night.

It’s painful to keep lying to yourself about yourself.

It’s painful to continue a relationship with someone you love, deeply love, when you get clear that it is no longer where you want to be.

Don’t get me wrong. Not all of me wanted to leave. A part of me was happy because I love him and I felt safe and secure with him. But that was only a part of it.

I also felt hemmed in by my own unwillingness to be true to myself…the real self.

And, I felt pain in my heart. The heart always knows.

This is where freedom really is…where there is no safety. I’m learning this. Not all of me believes it yet, but enough of me does to have brought me to this place.

The way does not reveal itself.

It doesn’t have to. It’s the way.

It doesn’t show up as a brightly lit, four-lane boulevard. Rather, it feels like the image above.

As I would lie awake at night, torn by this sense of needing to leave and a sweet love for the man lying next to me, I could feel the wild trees all around me, so thick I couldn’t see. It felt as if they were hiding the way, wrapping me in a darkness that felt frightening.

I was surrounded by the unknown, with just a small sliver of light and path ahead. Only a bit of the way was shown, and now, in hindsight, that bit was plenty. Always enough.

Somewhere in the midst of this wild forest of life is my wood line. The way is made from life itself, the wild forest giving over her bits of wood to be laid down end to end. A long curving line that snakes through the wildness of life.

Even the wild trees, the wild forest serves. I know without conflict, tension, friction, there can be no creativity. It’s in those sticky places where the desire for safety and the desire to be free rub up against each other. It is here where we can come to know the most humbling feeling of being the wild eye of infinite spirit living life through the limited reality of a human body.

As in the outer world, so in the inner world, so in the collective world.

This meandering path of Wood Line, forged by the death of cypress trees in a grove of eucalyptus, shows the way to a new life in a new world. The snake winds through me, too, beckoning me on to somewhere I can’t yet see, or that (as Marjory writes) “hasn’t been revealed to me yet.”

We are in an unshaped place.

This week I was on a call with Meg Wheatley. We spoke of her idea of hopelessness as a necessary way for these times.

In sitting with this sense, hopelessness is an invitation to let go of the ways I hold on to my old life. If this new life is to be truly new, letting go of hope means really letting go of my need for safety and security, of the ways I’ve known these things in the past. It means being with the shittiest of feelings that I have tried to avoid. It means beginning to trust in nothing but the ground that gives rise to existence itself.

And it is so in our collective world. The cypress trees of the old way, where greed, separation, and a wanton disregard for the earth were once cornerstones of how to be in the world, are taking their last gasps. As they die, the ground will again be visible.

“These fierce moments of grace are in many ways the most spiritually important moments of our lives.”

::

Wood Line by Andy Goldsworthy

Share

Wild Iris

Share
Wild Iris

Just imagine the beauty still veiled by these delicate petals.

Deep inside the heart of this wild iris is the most tender essence of life.

Perhaps we are like this.

Perhaps we save our innermost places of the heart for one beloved.

Share

To Feast Upon and Delight In

Share

I happened upon this, today.

This She that is a tree.

And so much more.

Majestic.

Strong.

Curvy.

Robed in soft moss.

How sensual are these arms?

How free is She to spread herself among the ways of the sky

while rooted in earth.

To gaze upon Her is

to feast upon

and delight in

Beauty

Grace

and

the Mystery of the Mother.

Share

Wiser and Softer

Share
IMG_2080
Glendalough

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. ~ Rumi

::

Reverb10 Day 10 Prompt:
Wisdom. What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?

::

My wisest decision this year was to travel to Ireland. My decision to go was based solely on intuition and trust. I trusted something felt, something unseen. Something deep inside called me there.

Jeff wanted to go to Maui. We’d had a very foggy summer and he was ready for warm sun and water. I went there last year and loved it. And, even though the moist land of Hana called to me, Ireland called to me in way I couldn’t analyze or understand. I just knew I had to go, and Jeff willingly agreed.

We saw much of the Republic of Ireland during the two weeks we were there. The land was enchanting. The people were some of the friendliest I have ever encountered in my travels. We saw many sites of the Sacred Feminine and soaked up the Land of the Goddess.

There, in this lush, wild land, the earth welcomed me home.

It is wise land. It felt as if it held a wisdom ripened over thousands of years. It affected me in countless ways – some seen and obvious, and some unseen and mystical.

The land of the Goddess seeped into my cells. That’s the only way I can describe it. Even now, months later, sitting in my home in California, I can feel her in me: the peat of Connemara, the rockiness of the Burren, and the wild heather of Glendalough.

Ireland was a great teacher. She polished my heart and taught me to trust in that which can’t be seen. She taught me to trust in that which is felt and known, yet can’t be explained in any logical way. She taught me to know that her wildness is my wildness, her beauty is my beauty, her sensuality is my sensuality.

I became wiser and softer in her care.

Share

Come Alive

Share

Summer is Dancing
Summer is Dancing

Reverb10 Day 09 Prompt:
Party. What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010?
Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.

::

This Invitation:

Each week, I accept this invitation to a raucous revival, a moving meditation, a chance to Sweat My Prayers. It’s a party. It’s a scene. It’s my church.

along with 149 other dancers, I

drop into the music

put my body in motion

leave the confines of my mind

breathe through my feet

dance my barefoot way to that wild and feral place I long for during the week when I’m out in ‘the real world’.

The music is eclectic. Motown. World. Jazz. Classical. Indian. Country. New Age. Old Age. Aquarian Age.

No food. Only water. No small talk. No talk at all.

This party is silent.

Our bodies talk.

‘We speak from the heart, not from the tongue.’ {M Franti}

This is sacred space.

Sweat drips.

Bodies slide and flow past each other as if choreographed finely. Something is directing things, but it’s no mind at all.

::

This wild place within:

I’ve tried to put into words how it feels to go to this wild place within.

It’s so foreign to this made up world we move in day in and day out.

In this place, my body is the earth’s body, and her body is mine.

Dancing, I can feel her power move through the cells and sinewy places within.

She comes up through the feet and out the exhale.

Her anguish makes itself known in my own heart, and I breath it in knowing her anguish is mine. How could it not be?

::

Today, I found my way to this powerful post by Holly Friesen:

Singing Rocks and Howling Wolves

Five years ago while painting in the woods, I had an encounter with a wolf. That creature’s golden eyes pierced through my heart and opened up a much neglected wild place within. My life tore open in ways I could never have imagined prior to meeting with his feral gaze. I started to paint ferociously. My “safe” lovely watercolor landscapes could no longer contain the wild energy that I felt building within. I began to paint larger, then I changed mediums, first oil and now acrylics. I left behind any people, places or habits that could not support this new passionate energy surging up through my body and spilling out onto the canvas in a frighteningly violent manner. Several months into this explosion I was diagnosed with breast cancer and in between daily radiation treatments I would paint, paint, paint. I walked through the woods and started to experience the earth’s body as my own. I recognized a deep connection that I had always understood intellectually but now I was feeling it inside my own body. This is now the place I paint from, that deep wilderness within. A wilderness that sings, and screams and howls with terror and beauty. Yesterday was one of those days in the studio where the earth’s voice just came flooding through my body and bursting onto the canvas in all her textures, shapes and forms. I am in love with paint and all it teaches me about this bond with the earth, and that wolf keeps howling deep within.

::

Within seconds of reading Holly’s words, I was transported to this wild place within where I “experience the earth’s body as my own”, this place of the dance where I

Come Alive:

.

Today I dance and come alive.

My hands connect, molasses-like energy stretching

from mama earth to the tips of my fingers.

As I perch on my paws, I feel her spirit

suck me into her tendrils of love.

She tells me to make my presence known.

She asks me to step so strongly on her

that there’s no question I am here with her.

.

She asks me to track myself,

to be so aware of where I am and where I am going,

so much so that my path wraps its way around and

around until I am simply the dance.

.

Today I dance and come alive.

I feel his pulse, absorbing it into my body.

I feel her love, letting it run down my arm and fill my heart.

I feel their joy, knowing it is also mine.

How could it not be?

.

Today I dance and come alive.

::

Singing Rocks and Howling Wolves shared here with the permission of Holly Friesen
The image, Summer is Dancing, is by Alice Popkorn shared under CC2.0.

Blog Widget by LinkWithin
Share