day eleven: 27 days of gratitude

When I began this post I wanted to write about faith, but faith implies a belief that doesn't rest on proof, it's the evidence of things unseen. When the road ahead is shrouded with a heavy mist of unknowing, I want a faith rooted in experience. Our busy minds tell us all manner of horror stories, could-be scenerios, terrifying possibilities and the like. On this very hike, photographed above, my mind piped up with all manner of tid bits about hungry mountain lions lurking in the tall grassland nearby, shrouded in cloud and intent on a sinewy meal. Minds do that. They have accepted the unfortunate dictate to keep us safe and free from pain. Which is of course an impossibility and an utter waste of 99.9% of our time. If I really examine the bumps and pitfalls of my life I can see that within them were great gifts, sometimes requiring a great deal of perspective, time and vantage to appreciate them. Today I am grateful for faith and its foundation in trust (confidence and reliance on things unseen). The mind can rest, however briefly, in the strength of experience with the things unseen, like winter landscapes that look bleak and lifeless but are already nursing the new life to come.

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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.

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...

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 ...

angelbirdflies

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