Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Balance
Tight left hammie running this morning, from intense, but amazing Power Yoga with Anaswara last night. It reminded me of the tight (read nonexistent) amount of time I have for being creative these days, as I spend 40 hours a week in a gray cube. Not a complaint, just a Vipassana observation. I wonder if we are ever truly in balance as humans for more than just a heartbeat. Or if the point of it all is to savor those times when we ARE in balance (or maybe one aspect of our life is REALLY working), give thanks, then just let go. Because being human seems to be about being in motion more often than stillness (for me lately, at least). About moving through change and growth, experience after experience, and not taking anything for granted anymore.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Stoplight Journaling
The stories I pass, each run on the bluff, speak volumes with their body language. My undefended heart faces them as I pass. Open to the homeless, the hopeless, the humanity through whose bedroom I guiltily tread, light as I can, so as not to wake them.
The abuella who I passed on my last two runs, who had sat on the same bench at the end of Idaho, overlooking the Pacific, head in hands—today she is reading a tiny book. A bible? I feel hope for her.
MJ’s Earth Song crashes through my head just as the ceiba tree in his music video crashes to the ground. Axis Mundi. Beloved magical tree. And then lifts back up, as tearful Aymara faces break into huge smiles. That’s how I feel lately. A lifting, a reversing . . . lightningbolt glimpses of recovery. Of me, of the Earth, of all of us.
This was the right time to move here. I couldn’t have experienced this expansiveness earlier in my life.
What a far cry from when I first lived in Boston in the bitter winter of 1981, where I stepped over frozen, homeless bodies in the Combat Zone on my walk to work in the morning. I’d never even seen homelessness before. Much less death. My heart shrunk into a tiny fist in that setting at that time. The armor began forming. I thought that by separating myself from the suffering of the world, I would be safe.
Safety only exists in opening to the Mystery. Can our pure essence truly be hurt?
The abuella who I passed on my last two runs, who had sat on the same bench at the end of Idaho, overlooking the Pacific, head in hands—today she is reading a tiny book. A bible? I feel hope for her.
MJ’s Earth Song crashes through my head just as the ceiba tree in his music video crashes to the ground. Axis Mundi. Beloved magical tree. And then lifts back up, as tearful Aymara faces break into huge smiles. That’s how I feel lately. A lifting, a reversing . . . lightningbolt glimpses of recovery. Of me, of the Earth, of all of us.
This was the right time to move here. I couldn’t have experienced this expansiveness earlier in my life.
What a far cry from when I first lived in Boston in the bitter winter of 1981, where I stepped over frozen, homeless bodies in the Combat Zone on my walk to work in the morning. I’d never even seen homelessness before. Much less death. My heart shrunk into a tiny fist in that setting at that time. The armor began forming. I thought that by separating myself from the suffering of the world, I would be safe.
Safety only exists in opening to the Mystery. Can our pure essence truly be hurt?
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