I was talking with a friend recently who shared that he felt like he had 1 week where he was able to get things done, start and finish projects, only to be followed by 2 weeks of not. I smiled listening to him, comparing his rhythms to my own. I feel like I have 1 day, I said, followed by many more before there is one day again. Or maybe it’s 3 hours in one day followed by many hours that… But wait a minute, before we go on, let’s inquire into what it is we are measuring.
Looking at our shared calendar, summer has just ended. We are starting to feel it in the bones. We know the shift - we anticipated it while it was still August! Schedules changed and we were asked to move in different ways. It’s darker in the morning. Lights get turned on. Windows need to be closed and then opened and then closed again. The garden is spilling out its fruit but we know, because we live here, these are lasts, things are turning back towards the roots, back towards underground. Our bodies know. The mind has other ideas, there are things that need to be done. It’s true, there are things that need to be done.
But what are they? How do we know? I might say something about alignment, here, but not yet, we might get to that and we might not, a word like that can be a little like a word like mastery. I want to start sooner, I’m not ready.
Days and weeks get sewn together with relationships, with responsibilities, with work, with families, with friendships, with weather - with desire. The thread is desire - at some point, if not now, something was connected with something else with the hope that something would ………. right there…. peer in… right here… what was that, what is that… it’s dark and hard to see…the stitch is on the underside…. I can’t remember or I never knew, not really… is it ok not to know? Is it ok not to know where to put the needle in? Is it ok not to know what it will become? Yes, of course it is! But wait, slow down again, what does it feel like not to know?… where does it feel? The heart, the belly, the head - inside your mouth?
When body knows that cold is coming or that rest is needed or that something or someway or someone you loved is leaving, has left; What there? Here? Where? How?
Is there ever not a desire to be connected with what is beautiful? to be linked to what it is you love? and there are so many hours where (it feels like) we are not - life is long and short, things take time, it’s not 3 hours in a day, it’s 10 minutes - where what? Where I feel close to the thing that eludes me. The dinner well made, the communication well executed — the satisfaction of listening to what your own soul wants, and answering- 3 minutes and never in the same order or the result of a certain combination - born of chaos - with everything outside of these minutes longing for that union and tightening the stitch.
Healing (we could interchange healing with the word “change”) is a process of being with presence and absence, the presence of the creative fire (call it anima, shakti, karma) and the absence of that which it desires - and there are moments where we know both at once. I can say I want things to be like this, or for this, so that they might come together to include me, grant entrance, permission, a feeling of being with, companionship, love and devotion, trust.
Practice, then. And never always, or yes always, devoted to that unseen, unknowable, and always not quite.
We practice. And there is grace, forgiveness, the empress rides backwards on her horse.
With love,
Molly