The paradox of self: Intimacy with life

We are, each of us, a paradox, a seemingly senseless combination of contradictions that, when considered in full, prove to be the truest expression of self. We each try to negotiate our interactions in an effort to cloak our inconsistencies from ourselves and those we love. How can we be both joyous and sad? How can we experience deep love and union alongside contraction and separation? How can we be patient and irritable, tolerant and judgmental, kind and cold? We crave closeness, belonging and connection but are afraid to be known fully.

My godmother and one of the great loves of my life, recently … I don't even know how to write it…died? (Death is a word meant to point to a mystery beyond anything the mind could comprehend and yet the mind doesn't like inconsistencies.) She lived a long life as a remarkable being. In the days and weeks following her death, people remembered her and in their memories she became less and less human and more and more saintly. She was special AND she was human too. I was blessed to love and know the whole of her, perhaps because she knew and loved the whole of me. That kind of love moves mountains.

When we ignore the paradox of our own humanity we distance ourselves from intimacy. It is not our perceived greatness that needs the warmth of belonging, it is our weakness, our vulnerability, our inconsistency... our humanness.

Navajo weavers intentionally weave mistakes into their rugs, to remind us that we are not perfect and that Spirit enters through our imperfections. When we welcome this paradox, in ourselves and others, we open to love and true intimacy on life's terms.

Comments

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...

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.

the way of the sunflower

A few weeks ago, I sat holding a sunflower seed in my hand, just prior to the mouth popping, mastication phase, when it's perfect elegance floored me. I stared in awe at the tiny seed nestled in my palm and saw it, in all of it's possibility, for the first time. A flower, a million seeds, a million flowers. Each unique, each the same. And suddenly I was dumbfounded by the arrogance of human. A small seed, with no big beefy brain to catalogue, categorize, prioritize, conceptualize, quantify, qualify, justify and deify, had within it the flower it could become. Dissect the seed and there's no flower, nor any glimmer of the life that will unfold when the seed surrenders to soil, light, water. I wondered. What arrogant assuming is it, to think, with our over indulged brains and narcissistic lens of "self", that we need "do", "think", "struggle", "fight", "hustle", "cajole" and otherwise dance our way...

angelbirdflies

Search This Blog