We can't love the rain if we're not willing to get wet

I have noticed something about life... everything changes.

We arbitrarily decide which weather we are meant to have...sunny, playful, loving, stress-free, affirming, fill in the blank... and then we worry about the forecast. We plan and prepare, we fret and watch for news, for signs, for disaster.

Listen.

It's gonna rain.
It's gonna storm.
There may be hurricanes and floods, blizzards and tornados. It's life. There will be ups and downs. The kids will drive us nuts and they will surprise us with their brilliance. People will amaze us and disappoint the holy shit out of us. Our health will be smooth and it will be rough. We will laugh our asses off and we will crumble to the floor crying. There will be birth and there will be death.

It's all here.

We wait for summer to set in and for the clouds of life to disperse forever. Some of us call it enlightenment, others success. Some call it the right relationship, others a hefty bank account.

The sun will shine and the birds will sing and the flowers will bloom. It's a fact. The skies will darken, clouds will storm and the leaves will fall. It's a fact.

Life is the whole experience and we can't love the rain if we aren't ready to get wet.

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

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