BlueStormCloud

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Thanks
by W.S. Merwin

What am I hanging on to? What’s the payoff for still hanging on? Is it working anymore? Is it really worth it? In a life of psychological stickiness we let go again and again, cycling through inner seasons like the annual leaf drop of the trees. Harvesting wisdom along the way, I pray.

Of course, telling the ego to let go of an old crippling pattern is like telling a pig to walk away from the shit. Let’s just start with giving thanks for the awesome job it’s done at maintaining our existence. I don’t know about you, but it was touch-and-go for me back in the day of full-on teenage confusion. Which by the way, lasted well beyond my teens. I’ve come to understand adolescence as a state of mind-being much more than a stage of chronological life.

Maturing into adulthood, at whatever age and however many times, has a quality of leaf dropping to it. We finally quit running from the very human in us – we quit looking for praise or spitting out condemnation – and stand rooted in the humus of our existence.

And in that ground we breathe in the wind of our innocent hurts, feeling it as it is. And that present full feeling expands into our lungs, maybe bringing grief to our heart like oxygen being delivered to our cells. And then we breath out, lest we choke on the toxins of holding on too long. The wind passes through us as it does through all things, taking the seasoned leaf, now ready to release. It returns to the ground. Not as waste, but compost. Not ceasing to exist, but being recycled.

Screaming at the tree to let go of its leaves before it is ready doesn’t work. I tried that one as a so-called adult and called it spiritual practice. That gave me a big laugh, as it should. Because as the Hopi say in their prophecy “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Waiting for us to realize who and what we really are. Then the leaves just fall off because it is time. And we move on to the next thing. Big or small. We move as we are moved.

Dear Beloved…

One of my favorite things about falling in love is writing love letters. I even mean the lick-the-envelope-and-wait style.  Seems a little old-fashioned in our post-post modern world of virtual and instantaneous everything. But what a perfect storm for the gorgeous tug of our heart’s deepest longing.

Such sweetness to sit in the stockpot of one’s own self and feel the exquisite blend of ingredients that gives way to the taste of loving the beloved, the frequencies of light bursting forth like rays of the sun. The heart is a temple of devotion, possessing a reason that reason does not know. Try making sense of the senseless act of falling in love and you run headlong into category errors of a deadening kind.

I much prefer to jump into the mess with a smile and write love letters, keeping reason in my toolbox for when it’s needed.  With a well-equipped tool box, the awakening of the heart, that is falling in love, just may be the flash of recognition we have been so patiently waiting for all our lives. Not the finding of “the one” out there. But finally releasing that endlessly defeating pressure and seeing that everything you adore in the beloved is most graciously everything Spirit has been waiting for you to adore in yourself.

There is enough room in the world for you both to be beautiful, for you both to be gifted, for you both to be adored. There is enough attention in the world for us all to be seen. Because that’s just what love is. And it’s free. The only cost is the expense of truly seeing yourself, without pulling for a boost from somewhere else. That is seeing that you are the beloved, that you are be-loved.

I guess this post is love letter to myself.

“Let me count the ways…”

“A spiritual person must take the wisdom and philosophy of the Earth and bring it back into modern society.” ~ Tom Brown, Jr.

That’s what I’m sayin’.

The world of creation is an omni-directional, non-stop mirror. Teaching us, if nothing else, to trust. The cedar tree reliably gives us the sweet smell of cedar. The water is always wet. The sunset forever brings the darkness of night.

In the absence of trust, we experience doubt. A force that can set in like a virus. Doubting our friends, our family, our neighbors, our politicians, our capacity, our goodness, our purpose for even being on the planet.

Yet we would never doubt the sunset, the water, the cedar…would we? Imagine accusing the water of not being wet enough!

Makes me realize that doubt is a colonel in the army that attacks self-love. Because what is creation but the ultimate act of self-love? God pouring herself out unapologetically into the world of form. And are we – human beings, me and you – really separate from that?

Doubt is only the enemy if we refuse see it as a doorway. And if we refuse to walk through that doorway to a trust that has no opposite.

What if we recognized every frame of our experience as the art we were meant to live? Every element showing up in the frame of the moment the right supply and the perfect stroke?

We might realize the heart as a memory bank. Capturing what cannot be captured. And storing the relentless flow of frames in a subtle stream of reality, felt but impossible to locate. The sequencing of a human life. Of experience as such.

Frame by frame.

A recent trip to Oregon (from Mississippi) pointed out through earth, air, color and temperature the distinctions of place. Differentiations that delight and disorient, that please and annoy. Variations of creation that seep into the soul like rainwater into the soil.

The ecologists teach us that this diversity is the basis and sustenance of life. All things of the earth interdependent by nature. All things of the earth being continuously recycled into all things of the earth.

No such thing as waste. Only generosity. Only the gift.

The greatest insights and creative flows really come in a moment of mysterious poof! Like the grass in the photo, while perhaps anticipated by the feeling in the air, the exact instant and experience of form bursting forth is incalculable by reason.

The calculator of the mind gives way to the calculus of creation. In other words, letting go is letting come.

But we can’t let go in order to let come. That’s the rub.

Sitting in the slowly turning air of Fall, in the quiet of her vulnerable changing, I feel a centripetal force in the cells of my body. There is a familiar longing to begin a long turning inward, a squirrel gathering his nuts to prepare for the work of Winter. It’s encoded in the DNA of nature’s order and as reliable as the day is long.

But how we have cut ourselves off from the tempo of our own essence, substituting the sweet measure of nature with the yardstick of numbers. We have forgotten to feel and know the source of the wool that we put on to keep warm as the air cools. We think it grows from the shelves from which we buy it. The wool that allows us to do more in the seasons when perhaps we ought to be doing less.

We are a materialistic culture, they say. And I say we are lousy materialists at that.