angelbirdflies

Humans! It's as if we imagine our big brained attempt at controling life's details has any effect on life.  As if the sun waits for me to say "RISE" or the heart waits for me to say "LOVE" or "PUMP".  News flash...It doesn't.  Life goes on being life and I am convinced that all of our efforts to control it are truly and completely a waste of the moment.  Perhaps we can stop clinging with desperation to our "should be" and "not quite" and instead breathe deeply into the "is" and "now" with abandon.  Afterall, there is no peace without surrender and there is no surrender without TRUST. So maybe, for an experiment, we can simply lean back into life's water and trust it's buoyancy enough to FLOAT and simply see what happens next.

We imagine how life is "meant to be" and then with mental acrobatics and toddler-like temper tantrums we try to align our lives with our imagined "should be's".  The truth is that we live our lives like a flower.  We bend and twist and turn toward the light.  The way is second to the intention.  All of us, no matter how perversely, are seeking the light.  All of us are stretching to bloom.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Happy Sunday!!! Pumpkin pancakes...dancing in parking lots...ninja parties...and all around hilarity!  Owen quote of the moment, "You are the most AWESOME mom in the world.  Really, I mean it!" Bodhi quote of the moment, "Don't be sad mom.  You are too beautiful to be unhappy!" Damn I am lucky!

Patience... Do you ever feel like no matter how much you think you know or understand or have learned you are constantly humbled by how much you don't understand, know or learn?  In fact, the hard ground of your own imagined knowing is often revealed to be nothing more than the gossamer musings of the mind.  That's where I am today.  Humbled by grief and fear and emotions that seem too wide and too big for any person to contain...so instead I open the windows of my heart and let the storm blow through.  I take down the walls and the roof and feel until there is no "ME" separate and apart, to understand anything.  And the wind blows a black sky through.  I learned something important about patience...it implies trust.  The areas that I have withheld patience are the areas I have withheld trust. I lean into the storm and trust the oneness of which I am inseparable to carry "me" safely through.

Mindful Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. It was what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over   in joy, and acclamation. Nor am I talking about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant - but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the daily presentations. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these - the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean's shine, the prayers that are made out of grass? ~ Mary Oliver ~ ( Why I Wake Early )

Sundays. A day of rest...how to spend it?  We begin with pancakes.  What other breakfast says rest more than a carb coma?  Then we go to the gym, so we can wake up again, and to our un-church so we can rest once more and contemplate our navel in the wide company of similar minded minions. Then we eat, somewhere, before a visit to the library where I tithe money for late fees and pray before an alter of books stacked and numbered neatly into rows.  And finally we return home, often by way of the grocers. In the presence of children, bickering and frolicking, I often make something...today it was maple-walnut granola, before I enforce 45 minutes of quiet time.  Everyone withdraws to their own corners (the youngest member of our household requires multiple reminders).  In these stolen moments I retire to my latest boon of books...delicious, delirious, hungry.  Today my stack looked like this: I was only able to devour one book of poems by Debor...

“O, happy the soul that saw its own faults.” -- Rumi If that is the case my soul must be in a state of ecstatic bliss because faults seem to be parading in front of me with unparalleled abandon.  Recently, someone asked me if I was patient and I answered with an assured YES!  Who among you who has seen me work with children, or stand in awe before a sunset, or listen to a stranger would doubt my confidence.  And THEN life showed me quite differently...and I learned that it is possible to be gifted at something in one way and utterly piss-poor at it in another.  So back to patience.  What is it? I looked it up and it's defined as the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble or suffering without getting angry or upset. We all have strengths and weaknesses, right?   In some areas of my life I have the patience of a saint and in others I would be stretching things to say that I have the patience of a flea.  Go figure?  My soul st...

Many people have asked me why I have a circle on my back...just a circle. I tell them, "It is to remind me that we are whole before we begin", but even that doesn't approach the truth...which is I just needed to put it there.  I am not even entirely sure why.   “I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.”  Rilke “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.”  -Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is need ? Literally the word means "to require (something) because it is essential or very important". It seems obvious that to be ensconced in a human body implies need.  The body needs water and food and shelter. These needs aren't something to be ashamed of or ignored.  They are basic to sentient life. There are other needs as well.  Needs no less real or essential and yet needs that we often deem of lesser value, even to the point of sublimating them in favor of our deified cultural values of independence, self-sufficiency and singularity.  These needs include touch and affection.  They include safety and security.  They include love and belonging. I am curious about these needs.  Why do we bury them shame facedly? Is it because they have gone unfulfilled and so the desire for them is hidden away, even from ourselves, only to arise with tenacious hunger before we beat them back again and again.  It seems terribly sad. I am beginni...

Out of the darkness comes the light...or is it in light there is no darkness...or get out of the way you are standing in the light...or you can only see the shadow when your back is turned to the light...or something like that.  I don't know for sure but I certainly have been casting shadows.  It is interesting, this game of life and our propensity to take it so damn seriously.  Perhaps it just IS.  Perhaps it isn't as ripe with deep significance necessitating big brain ponderings late into the night.  Perhaps.  

 Christmas morning at a house with a young child is always a whirlwind.  This Christmas was no different. Bodhi was up long before the sun, pressing his chilly feet against my legs and whispering a question in my sleep deprived ear, "Is it time yet?".  I rolled over and tucked him beneath my chin in a big morning hug, "Soon".  In a short time he crawled out of bed and I could hear his bare feet rhythmically hurrying over wood floors to peek beneath the boughs of a twinkling tree.  I imagined his face light up at the surprise of gifts and a loaded stocking hung by the fireplace.  His bare feet padded a quick return to my warm bed as he loudly whispered, "Mom! Santa DID come! And he brought LOTS of presents for me AND Owen!"  With this he grew quiet.  I knew he was thinking about mom.  His brows furrowed in concentration.  I wondered if he might be remembering a conversation we had just a few days prior that went something like this,: ...

"Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life."  Eckhart Tolle, Oneness With All Life

The loom is ready.  The warp is prepared and ready to receive the weft.  I look at it with my metaphorical sensibilities and have to smile.  We think our lives are supposed to be uncomplicated and easy.  Like straight, supple lines of warp, wound carefully and doled out to us, a year at a time, with uncompromising appeasement.  How dull is that?  There is nothing to hold it together.  No weft.  The weft is essential: life interacting with life, weaving under and over, creating tension and texture, pattern and variation. How might our relationships be different if we approached one another with spaciousness.  If we responded to connection and union with a willing invitation to the tensions implicit in dancing with other?  How might our lives look if we abandoned the premise of safety and appeasement and instead welcomed the wonder and uncertainty of the unknown; if we responded, moment by moment, with a weavers hand: respecting the n...

The boys and I celebrated the last night of Hanukkah with a disgusting meal ala Angelina...really it was remarkably bad.  Bodhi had been feeling a little punky all day and after his second bite of beet greens and spinach he gagged.  I said, "Spit it out.  In fact everyone spit it out.  This food is terrible."  Unfortunately, Bodhi's belly was already lurching and he began a tremendous display of projectile vomiting where he stood.  I was poised nearby, arms out stretched, legs spread wide in the stance of a referee on home base calling "SAFE". I carried him to the sink where he continued unabated and I spent the rest of the evening cleaning, bleaching, rocking, soothing and pampering.  Ahh.  A celebration of light in preperation for the longest night of the year.  An appropriate event for such a night.

My mom and I hiking.  My beloved sister-love Michelle My brother in his convertible feeling the groove. It's good to be in Prescott and hard all at once...just like coming home always is.

Quote of the day from Bodhi's utterly random ramblings: "Acually and scientifically the world is in fact flat and Egyptians said it was round.  Who am I? It starts with a B- B- B.  Ballet dancer (insert a dance).  Egypt is in fact right.  What am I now? An alien with four arms.  The aliens live near the world, they thinks it's round too...I say flat and round.  Egypt is right and the scientists are right and the aliens too and people are right...except for Owen.  Owen is wrong."

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you. Turn to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your womb tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. _David Whyte The House of Belonging

Okay...gasp...shock...insanity.  I signed onto match.com for three miserable days.  Ugh.  And I thought facebook was objectifying and crazy.  I discontinued and learned a great deal.  1) I would rather be lonely, 2) you can get 60 emails in 12 hours, 3) If we all just offered present moment beingness to one another during the simple goings on of our days we would find ourselves feeling far more connected and far less alone.  So here is what I am going to do...I am going to practice talking to people.  Being kind to people.  Not rushing away when I could stay and offer presence to a situation.  I discovered that I have been retreating all my life.  I wonder what life would be like if instead I began taking steps forward.  It is worth considering.