My sorrow is lying next to me when I awake. I resist the urge to grab my phone or run away. My body a shell of what it once was, cold and empty. Already defeated before I’ve even started the day. So this morning I turn to face my hurt filled lover. Unwillingly yet resigned to face the truth. I embrace my grief and merge to become one, knowing the wholeness of one is finer than the dual. This morning‘s pain so deep, only one tear trickles down my face and the rest rain inside my body. How healing a good rain cry is, it washes and cleanses yet also nourishes. I’m sorry my lover of sadness that I often neglect you, with the busyness of life it’s easy to forget you. But when I take the time to connect deeply to know you, our intimacy gives me the strength to carry on with life.

To dance to the beat of my own life’s drum has always been easier said than done. An introvert in an extrovert world has always been more painful than I let on. Trying to be this person for that person and that person for this person, has been my gift and also my con. So I try to fit the mold of my circle to your square, hoping and praying there’s none to be aware. No one is looking. How could it be? In a world caught up in ‘me’. The truth is I’m different than I may appear. Why I always hid from the world, I’m not that clear. How much work it is trying to be something I am not. My soul’s wisdom and essence was something I often forgot. Yet age softens the edges of these constructs. Too tired to care and so I leave it bare. With time the beat of my own life’s drum grows louder. And with each year, a growing power. The nervous turn to calm, the fear turn to courage. A soft peace to accompany my drum, along my life’s passage.

As the tightness of my ego loosens its grip on my body, I fall gently backwards. My spine realigning and floating easily as I unfurl. The force and gravity of the heavens pulling on my puppet strings. I relax knowing a new more intelligent master is taking control. Where this play will take me I do not know. No rehearsing lines or dressing up, I soften and enjoy the show. The force of the stars, sun, planets and moon was always more than we knew.Just because the city lights blurred them out didn’t mean they didn’t exist.Universe, I’m sorry I forgot your tremendous strength. Yes I can see you, but even better I can feel you. Your electric power igniting my inner spark. My yin waters conducting your mighty yang, as I embark.

I am the clouds moving quickly across the sky and I am also this body. How is this so? I do not know? Yet it is…
Like a hurricane that rips and tears through a tower leaving an empty shell, I look across the land at the strewn pieces of me. Life’s force much too great to try to make sense of this disordered state. Feeble and vain attempt to heal the blight is the comical tale of humanity’s plight. So I sit and allow the clouds and wind to pass through the empty rooms that remain. Fresh and new and light, when I finally let go of the fight. I am the clouds and this body.

She comes from the womb of the earth and is the mover of water.She’s been taught for a lifetime to walk the straight and narrow course, yet the innate river that dances inside her has always had another force. Her body ebbs and flows with passions and woes. Her crestfallen spirit spills tears into the ocean only to rise the tides with its shedding. Her anger, the breakers on shore with each each truth that she pour. More often than not, no idea of where she’s heading. To be a woman in the world of boxes and squares, has never made sense with its waste and wares. The streams that run through the veins of her body, meander and wander like spirit divining. She finally embraces her power and flow and trusts in all that she does and does not know

My time of tuning to you Nature, binds us now for life. I listen crow, for the beating of your wings in flight through the sounds of traffic. I listen to you little bird with your sweet chirping banter past the sounds of sirens. I clutch your hairs, sweet grass to feel sensual closeness to your deep, weighted and earthly support. I hear you rustling leaves of my friends the stable trees, past the sounds of protest and anger that resides in the streets. Nature, although it often seems you fight for your place in the noise of the city, I hear you, I feel you, I see you and smell you. You keep my senses alive. And by tuning to you nature, you remind me always that it is in fact you that roots me in my healing in my urban dwelling. So I listen and meditate past the drowning rumble of the city and I hear you Silence, remembering that You silence are actually my true Nature.

The vice binding my head holds me strongly to the illusions of life. I quiet and relax in attempt to loosen its grip, tentative like a deck of cards starting to tip. It holds so tight, a protection from this lifetime and others. Force has never worked for this delicate procedure as I’ve been told by my foremothers. So I wait and I breathe and I notice what I notice… Finally one stone loosens like a rock dislodged from a mountaintop. Will an avalanche ensue? Will one rock fall or a whole mountain collapse? I surrender to it’s power, nothing to do but to witness. Other doors are revealed to me, as I access the depths of loneliness. Like a loose stitch on a fabric I pull on a thread, revealing deeper chambers of lost pieces of me. Like glowing caves in the dark, I visit my traumas one by one. Bringing my age and wisdom and love to each one. The air is thick and stale with ancient hurts and ancestral knots. Finally pain is released through the surrender of moon time blood, a deep soaking of the brittle earth and mud. A sacred offering of my soul. My numb womb warming with the reclaiming of power for both mother earth and woman extolled.

The guru waves his hand across my mind to still my motion. Continuing along his flowered filled path, a flow of love trailing behind him in devotion. His loving smile and glance and third eye kiss, rendering my bliss. Stepping out of me and into Knowing. Knowing follows the slow compassionate river on the journey to nowhere, the most precious place in existence. The saturation of stillness, the glorious gift of nothing and everything, the absolute subsistence. No mind or body, no urge or desire. Breath the only tethering as I expire. Simple Presence is present. The glory of Being Now. The wisdom of the Saint blessing my avow.

I awake from the nightmare with a sudden breath clutching to life. The eternal quest for escape from death.

Sleep, soothsayer or truth sayer? What if I was to not fear the unknown? Look out at disaster from my glass tower. Let tsunamis consume me and fires burn me.

See my face reflected in the window before it breaks. A glimpse of my soul, left in the waves wake. What would be my last thoughts in life? Fear, prayer or awe of the eternal? The final moments before death, my translucent image smiles to me with the soundless words, I Love You. I release, I let go, I surrender to the dream of life and understand in this moment called Now, that there was never anything to hold onto in the first place.

This time off and recovery period from Covid has afforded me the time to really look at my impulse of doing. Where does it come from? The old program of ‘should do’ versus ‘feel like’. I choose the word ‘feel’ over ‘want‘ because for me the impulse comes from feeling into my body and noticing physical sensation in terms of desire or lack of desire. Of course we all have things on our list of to do’s but if our life becomes a continual list we fall into monotony and discontent. Before the Covid illness there really was not much balance in my life. I rarely did things out of the impulse of what I really felt like doing.

The friendships of women hold hands around the world. Extra sensing beings, the subtle mixture of pain and delight. Oh how heavy is the load that we carry; a mother, a wife, a lover, a daughter, a friend. We birth creation, we move mountains for our children, we lose sleep with our worries, we sway the tides. Yet the biggest gift we give is feeling the pin drop on the world. The processing of energies for humanity and the planet alive. We revel in the glorious nature of the sky and stars yet remember always that we came from the earth and her waters.

You thrill my senses, bristling life at the sea. Your wind thunders in my ears as I tread your cracked fossil rock beds and barnacles homes. The moistened thick air, the perfect ride for the winded wings of the crows.

A good beach combing pulls up fine hairs of tickling seaweed. Cross crabs scraping under rocks. The smell of oyster stew brewing for the evening dinner of champions of seals.

As I ease my way back into the land of the living one of the insights that arose early on after my battle with Covid was the desire to find more joy in my life. It’s true that when you come close to the edge of death, life and it’s sacredness becomes more evident. I’m still in process, but there certainly feels like there is already a before the Covid and after the Covid as a turning point in my life. The reflection of my lack of joy in life, in its simplicity became a new goal that I wished to address. And as I started to try to implement that new learning I realized I just wasn’t in that place. I was sick. I felt sick and I was grieving the loss of my body and health. I needed to embrace that painful experience fully to learn the beautiful lesson of letting go and true presence.

Life can be painful when we expect life to give us our desires. Most of us put out your intentions in life and either receive and are glad or don’t receive and feel disappointment.

When I shifted my expectations of life to one more of service by asking each day what life and spirit wants from me or for me? Everything changed. I ask, how can I serve the divine? How can have it flow though me in the way that I speak, move and interact with people and life? How can I show my devotion to to the Sacred?

Shifting your awareness in life from one of expectation to one of devotion can shift you deeply in ineffable ways. Live your life like a prayer.

Words, pictures of thought. Plucked from the sky or handed down from above, I do not know. They come like silent whispers. Life forms of their own. An invisible pen in motion. Steering feelings and ideas, winding them down their pure path to mysterious worlds.
Like skipping rocks on the stillness of your being; words and thoughts jump and travel yet always dissipate. So close your eyes and let the universe download it’s knowledge and remember they were never your words in the first place.

We’ve seen the world in much upheaval over the last few years. Groups of people talking about us versus them, and on and on. A lot of anger at the inequities in life. And while I value the new paradigms that are starting to emerge from these fights against injustices, I have to wonder if perhaps as humans we should not look at ourselves first. Start making these changes on the simplest level. On yourself, in your own home. The hatred we express is only an expression of the hatred that we are feeling within. And if we were to look deeper we would understand and have compassion, for it is almost certain that that hatred comes from deep hurt and inner wounding.

We tell our children to be kind to others, but children learn by example. We are kind to others, but why don’t we first start with being kind to ourselves?… By healing our inner wounds we heal ourselves. We heal the next generation and the next generation and so on. We heal the world.

Now I can donate, stand up for a worthy cause or support someone in their plight, but if I don’t truly understand what compassion is by the experience of having compassion within myself, for myself, then can I truly have compassion for another soul? In actuality my giving becomes mere rhetoric. This is not an energy that can change the world.

Loving oneself is not easy. It requires inner observation, honesty and diligence in each moment. But when we can live in the state of inner peace and self-love, we carry this vibration and put out into our lives. I believe that self-love can be one of the greatest gift we can give the world. The ripple effect of this blessing into humanity is truly sacred.

Naked nighttime nature stumblings are a quiet soulful comfort. Awoken by the cool light of the moon, my silent shadow leads the way. Brilliance of stars inviting us to their party. The music; rustling leaves and whispering waters. And of course a crazy cricket. Me, a night owl dancing with the night owls. Tree tops and clouds closing their curtains on the show. A cup of moon milk and we, my shadow and I, are ready to fall back into the mysteries of dreams where we are held so softly by the yin of life.

Tears of life falling from the sky. My soul cries with you. Your drumming on my rooftop, unsettled, reflecting my inner temperament. Oh rainy day, was it you that drew me in to your sorrow or MySelf reflected in your outpouring? It matters not. The tears are waiting in the depths of the lakes of old pain. Maybe this time I’ll be courageous enough to float in the fullness of emotions and feel the reality of me. And as I do, I realize that with each drop that you pour, you cleanse the leaves of my vines and fill the empty wells for me and my nature friends; watering our dispassion until we are nourished and pure again.

As a ground my energy, I feel my interconnectedness with all of nature. My roots extending and wrapping the planet. Hugging and digging deep into the safety of mother Earth, I relax….. This quiet convalescing period, took my mind and replaced it with a trusting Knowing. A falling into being and not a connecting to nature but rather a reacquaintance with what has always been. Like all of the trees and nature coexisting in perfect harmony, I remember too that I am part of this perfect plan. That by letting go, smelling the air, hearing the sounds, seeing the wonder, I can taste the sweetness of life in it’s luscious August blackberries. I can receive the gift of each precious moment as it unfolds like a sunset in it’s sometimes seemingly imperfect yet always perfect now. Not resisting or trying to change, but trusting in its perfect flow.

So as I let go of my mind, my shoulders relax with the earth’s force of gravity. And like the weeping willow tree, my arms sway and cry their remaining tears to water and nourish the dry broken lands of the mother.

A slow drowning of my mantra until the wind and waves wash fully through me. A body with no edges. Rhythmic music of sound layers permeating me from everywhere. I am pleasantly swallowed up into the safety of my shell. The pearl of my being, resting and peaceful.

As I began to navigate this new post Covid time within my daily life, I realized that I had re-created the patterns from my previous life and existence. This would make sense as my patterns are my patterns. Being a doer, it was like I was trying to find someway to accomplish even without the ability to accomplish. Did I get my meditations in, did I do qigong, did I rest, did I do laying down breathing practices? Did I lay on the healing mat? Did I lie in the sun? Did I lay on the grass? Did I eat properly? Did I do my healing bath? Did I take my vitamins? A sick life can certainly be a busy life. But within this seemingly open day I now had crowded it with a whole new set of accomplishments. The sick person‘s version of accomplishments. All new ways of searching for fulfillment. Fulfillment that can never be unless there is pure presence within each of these tasks. Eventually a certain lack of satisfaction hit me. A knowing that I had just re-created an old version of doing. It’s like trying to stop time by grasping at the air. Nothing to hang onto. No ability to control. Again a lesson in letting go. Only pure presence can fill that hole that I’m trying to fill. The doing mind is insatiable. So I let go again and again and again and allow the day and unfolding to surprise me with its spontaneous gifts. Knowing that each day is perfect how little or more I do. Did I find joy? Was I present? These are the greatest accomplishments I could hope for in a day.

The strong winds of life blew me off the cliff… I fall backwards. Thank goodness I’m caught by the gentle waters of my mother. The river dragging me to my next destination. I’ve already let go of so much by this point that there’ll be no fear upon my arrival. This continual lesson in surrendering and softening has almost become pleasurable in the feeling of freedom of watery flow. The fact and realization is, that I was never in control. How arrogant to think that I was. So I lick my finger and put it to the air. I feel which way the winds of life are blowing now and continue in that direction.…

The scroll that resides between my mind’s temples is tightly wound. Guarding the secrets of this life and others. With quiet meditation it loosens, revealing it’s ancient wisdoms, unraveling and pouring its knowledge into all the cells of my being. This process is not one of studying or reading, but of a receiving of this precious intelligence. Through this Surrendering there is a realization that the scroll is blank. The universe laughs, ‘How can Being be expressed in words’. Yes I Am here and I Am there and also I Am everywhere.

So my unwound scroll, I now wear like a cape. And as it blows in the wind it is torn from my mind, taking it’s knowledge of everything and nothing with it.