Skip to main content

connection

It has been an interesting few weeks.  I have been contemplating connection a great deal as a basic need of being human.  I watch my fellows rushing from one place to the next, gathering technology to themselves like talismans of protection against the emptiness of separation- a perpetual flutter of texts and calls and music and smart phones and GPS and more.  Yet so many of us are longing for the central cord of union- with one another, with ourselves, with life.  It's as if we are frightened of being disappointed, so we retreat deeper and deeper into the tight orbit of self.  My teacher recently filled me in on a little secret...the meaning of life is to LIVE IT.  That isn't tidy or safe.  It is messy and vulnerable and unpredictable and unknown.  And yet LIFE extends an invitation to us in every moment asking us to unleash the breathtaking beauty hidden in our hearts and experience, EXPERIENCE, experience life.  Life isn't singular.  It manifests in multiplicity, with no part existing in isolation.  There are no clear parameters to being.  Life- as you, as me, as friend, as enemy, as bird, as bush, as air, as earth, as water.  It takes courage to lift our heads and hearts from the tendency to contract and to extend a hand in connection.
Courage.  But what's the alternative?  A life unlived is no life at all.

I press your hand.

Comments

Wind said…
I have also been thinking about this. Only I interpreted it as "being in relationship". You cannot have a life without being in relationship with something or someone. I love that these messages are coming through! Let us be intentional with our connectedness!!
November 20, 2012 at 7:55 PM
Angelina Lloyd said…
YES. being in relationship...we are in overlap all the time. There is no other way to be. We create a lot of tension with our imagined separation. A lot of unnecessary baggage.
November 20, 2012 at 7:59 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.
4 comments
Read more

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
2 comments
Read more

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...
4 comments
Read more