Writing and Reflections: Field Notes

Let me be a fountain instead of a thorned rose, and you will be a mountain (you always were)

It was always your calling, you see,
to find a way to love yourself deeply,
to not beg for love, or seek it externally,
or wait for it, or try to hold on to it,
but to drench yourself with it, moment by precious moment.

Do not abandon yourself when you feel abandoned,
for there is a pain worse than abandonment:
The abandonment of self, the flight from where you are.
Running from yourself when you most need yourself.

TRUST YOUR WINTERS

There are days I doubted it would. I was convinced this past winter was too hard and the storms too violent. There was a stretch of about a month when it rained everyday, with spans of record-breaking torrential pours, and I worried our garden would wash away (some of it did). But yesterday out in our little orchard I was delightfully stunned - the fruit trees are budding! Peach, plum, nectarine and apple trees have all sprouted tightly bound promises.

UNCONDITIONAL

A transcendent poem by spiritual teacher, Jennifer Welwood

a birthday prayer

When I came here I asked for the whole thing.

I didn’t want easy.
I didn’t want boring.
I wanted big.
I wanted surprises.
I wanted high caliber humor and lots of rosy-cheeked humility.
I wanted ecstatic peaks and abysmally dark valleys.

The Never-ending Ending Of Things by Jeannette Encinias

No one is coming to rescue you.
No one is coming to make
the sea of your life
any less rough.

All storms and beauty and miles of water undone.

It is this way for each of us.
We all get swept away
tossed around
face in the sand
gasping for air.

Alive, almost gone, alive, alive, alive.

The Fortune of Motherhood: A Birth Story

Deep in the timeless space of a heavy contraction I envisioned the energy it must have taken the universe to be born, and that this birth felt like a microcosm of the original big bang - carrying with it the same magnitude of exquisite profundity. I thought - if the cosmos could yield to the birthing contractions, so could I. After all, aren’t I made of the same star stuff?

10 RULES FOR BEING HUMAN

You will learn lessons.
You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called “life”. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate the, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.

There is no way out but through...

“A wound not fully felt consumes from the inside. We must run very hard if we want to stay one step ahead of this pain. Exhausted, we try to bury it with drugs, alcohol, overwork, television, physical activity. We are a very creative species—we can use just about anything to anesthetize ourselves. But in doing so, we also remove ourselves from feeling the joy. Life becomes less, and if we are even slightly numb, it is hard for us to find the wisdom we need in our lives and our world.” - Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation

it keeps getting better

I open like a slow bloom… and it keeps getting better.
I open again, this time with feeling… and it keeps getting better. …

a miracle of pleasure

I don’t care how your body looks.
Do not complain to me how it isn’t this way or that.
Tell me, woman, what it does.
Tell me how it blooms under a lover’s friction.
Tell me how at its dark, pulsing center you pull souls into being
through your bliss.

I am divinity and I am a fucking mess.

I am divinity and I am a fucking mess.
I am God and I am a weird original,
flawed, unfinished painting of a "human being’.
I have no limits, and so I limit myself in ingenious ways.
An ecstatic poem by Jeff Foster

reflections from the well of grief

Reflections on my time at the bottom of the well of grief, on the help I got that lifted me out, and how I am enjoying this new, tender self that has emerged through my difficult year of multiple heartbreaks.

I also share my summer selections of books, podcasts and playlists that I have been enjoying lately.

ANTIFRAGILITY

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. . . .⁣

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means— crucially—a love of errors...”⁣⁣

The binary is a distraction from waking up to the elegant complexity of life. ⁣⁣⁣⁣

Note to self: Life is both. ⁣⁣It is gorgeous and grotesque. ⁣⁣It is immaculately intelligent and painfully nonsensical. ⁣⁣It is comforting and terrifying and awe-inspiring and confusing. ⁣⁣It is both. ⁣⁣And it is the in-between. ⁣⁣⁣⁣We are both. ⁣⁣We contain both. ⁣⁣We contain multitudes. ⁣⁣