I'm going to begin by reading one of my favorite poets,
David White,
And he says,
The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability,
How we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance.
Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss,
Robustly and fully or conversely as misers and complainers,
Reluctant and fearful,
Always at the gates of existence,
But never bravely and completely attempting to enter,
Never wanting to risk ourselves,
Never walking fully through the door.
We mouth the words I love you to one another across a crowded table of people,
Dirty dishes,
Crumpled napkins and a single flickering amber candle.
Reading his tiny lips and getting lost in the gleam of his perfect hazel six-year-old eyes,
I curiously saw the image of a wave in my mind.
That wave had arrows pointing forward to show me its trajectory and it carried the words,
There is a wave called love,
This wave is your life.
This wave rose high,
Cresting into a beautiful arc and it began to descend.
Braided into the swell was its cycle,
Arising and falling from love to suffering to despair,
From love to sadness and grief.
And the essence of joy was intertwined.
I saw in that moment that in agreeing to love my son,
To love anything for that matter,
I will eventually and in due time be carried through the cycle and the sorrow-soaked moment of its grievous end.
We all know this,
This is life,
Right?
But we struggle to stay on the wave.
We are seduced by love only to pull back from the wave's accompanying friends.
We don't know how to receive the full expression of love,
So we never fully taste it.
We unconsciously and daily say yes to the wave with one part of our being and no with another.
We see this time and time again throughout our lives.
We desire to love and commit,
Crave creativity and connection,
Open our mouths to speak,
Our arms to hold,
And then at some point,
Abort.
We come to the wave's crest seeing we are about to dive headlong into pain,
Fear,
Sorrow,
Or grief and we jump off the wave with only a fleeting taste of joy on our tongues.
We shut down our hearts in our intimate relationships,
Escape into addictions,
And we climb into the attic of our minds.
We stop writing poems.
Dreams are for fools.
When love is in the room with us,
We keep folding the laundry,
Checking our phones,
While it sits in the armchair in our periphery,
As if they will always be there.
We push off from our body as if it's not ours,
Condemning the only home we have because we are too afraid to fully own what lives inside of us.
When I feel love now,
I know what to do.
I notice the unmistakable warmth swelling from an unnameable source in me and I stop every movement and I think to savor it.
I let my whole body soften like soil ready to grab the drifting seed.
I become the receptive earth and allow the felt sense of love into my chest,
My throat,
My eyes,
And mind,
Circling back down to the root of my body where I let it finally pool in the bowl of my pelvis and womb.
I love.
I let love in.
I've discovered the first step to staying on the wave is to stop long enough to fill myself with the presence of love.
It's to find your feet inside the circle and heartbreaking crash by anchoring ourselves in the driving force of our life.
Our moments are medicine.
Even during the downturn of the wave,
Our life is tidal swell after tidal swell of love.
And if we don't feel this way at any given moment,
We're not looking carefully enough.
I know streams carry cures in their sound.
Moving water creates an abundance of negative ions that we absorb into our systems.
These negative ions bring more oxygen into the blood and they help filter toxins.
I lay by them often,
Close my eyes,
And go straight into their melody and let it inform my cells.
The water says open,
Move,
Keep traveling.
And I know my pores are connected with the forest moss and bark and my body knows how to speak with them and as I walk I receive antibodies.
Tiny spores that carry antibacterial and antifungal qualities enter my breath.
Teaching my body how to make cells to fight tumors and viruses.
I know the loneliness I sometimes felt at night when I was little was another world beyond my awareness beckoning.
I see the insecurity I feel when my partner looks into my eyes,
Teaches me how I hide from being seen and seeing another,
And it gently urges to feel the shaky ground.
Dare to stay open anyway.
And I know the jokes about how deeply I feel can point to the whole I and the one ridiculing me need to heal.
They're the same pain speaking.
Looking for active partners in healing,
Long held beliefs around sensitivity,
Vulnerability and our fear of heart space living.
Nothing we feel or experience dead ends.
Our life is an intelligent communicating organism asking us to stop long enough at the borders to receive wisdom,
Guidance and love.
Directing us and holding us buoyant through the process of the wave if we dare to stay on.
I only sometimes knew this.
I wasn't aware that love was coming to me from plants and wounds and people and that I was meant to pause and receive this love.
That this was the secret to staying on the wave.
As we all are I was caught in the pain of our life,
You know,
Listening to the distance and the echoing voices caught in the wrong and right of things,
The myopic,
The condemn and close down way of seeing,
The deny and look away cycle.
I would let the heat of heartache and difficulty dislocate me instead of inquiring about the process to which the fever was giving way.
The transformation beckons from the discomfort.
The vulnerability really is the doorway to our life.
But luckily if we create the conditions to receive and we train ourselves,
We will begin to hear just how kind a symphony holds us.
Listening differently we can find how to take everything in as if it were a gift and in so doing understand how to let the full expression of love into our experience.
A gift is only sometimes perceived as a gift.
Mary Oliver wrote,
Someone I once loved gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.
Gifts are not always wrapped in silk cloth or tied with a crimson bow.
Gifts are hidden in the grit of our life.
Deep inside the marrow of the bone the nutrients we most need are encased in something that feels like rock and impossible walls.
But we don't need chisels and drills to find the gift inside.
What we actually need is soft,
Hard breathing,
Undefended,
Palms open and rested on our lap.
We must focus on being receptive to love,
Not defended against it.
But how do we do this?
Where do we begin?
How do we train ourselves to accept the full expression of the wave?
And the answer is you must love with all of your heart and grieve with all of your heart.
You must love with all of your heart and embrace fear and doubt,
Worry and disappointment with all of your heart.
You will know joy throughout if you can learn receptivity to every place.
True joy is this peculiar cocktail poured into us once we learn to let ourselves live inside the proper cycle of love which is life.
To allow ourselves to move through the domain of sorrow and grief with grace.
And then,
Only then,
Will we know the nectar of this life.
So I'm going to invite you now to close your eyes if you'd like just so we can deepen our seeing together.
It's changing our focus to incorporate our breathing in our body,
Our hearts,
Our lungs.
And we begin by noticing how we are actually being propelled.
How we're held between the forces of gravity and light.
We are constantly in flux and pushed by pressure.
We are one part air and another density and weight.
And this tension is what makes love possible.
This tension is what makes life possible.
We must know this first in order to come down into the body that is so often straining away from itself.
Because of the intensity that comes with being alive and embodied.
Dear intensity in my body,
Dear intensity and pressure living in me,
I welcome and receive you.
We say yes to this part of our humanity so we can be more home in ourself.
We rest and receive,
Unhurried and unhindered.
I know we can get lost trying to arrive at a life that doesn't mean death or disease or fear and suffering.
This avoidance is the time consuming refusal of the wave and it's actually where we live most of the time.
And this is the place we need to look straight in the eyes.
Studying how much time we spend here.
Really watching for the subtle ways in which we resist and say no to what we're going through.
And we just pause to see all the ways that we narrow our focus and stay in these cycles of avoidance and we pivot to see the beauty of the wave in its entirety.
We do this by seeing there is a cycle to the wave and that we are willing to ride the cycle of the wave.
And I want you just to see how resisting the wave feels in your body.
How when you're at that crest you jump off for a void.
And standing in this gap between what we know and what we long for,
I want you just to lift your face toward the sky.
And I want you to open your eyes and see the wide sky mind.
Really breathing yourself awake.
Take this moment of honesty to let the magnitude in.
And just for this moment,
Let your body find the courage.
Let your body find the yes to all of it.
What does yes feel like in your body?
How can you use yes and thank you?
Yes and thank you.
At every threshold.
Breathing deeply.
Just letting this new awareness,
This wakefulness,
Become very real and sharp and focused.
What I've started doing is just catching the thoughts that feel at odds with my moments and whatever's coming up for me.
Whether it's a mental resistance.
Sometimes I think about one of my parents dying and feel this no screaming up through my body.
I've learned to just say yes.
How can I say no to the natural unfolding of things?
Why would I want to create such suffering for myself?
And I open.
I open to the cost of love.
We stand on this earth and we have to try the best we can to allow the force of life to run through us.
It is what is.
So we must smile somewhere in between the forces that are.
Just to really watch and express gratitude for this absurd gift of being alive.
I don't want to spend my life afraid in the face of this mighty existence.
I know I long to be tolerant and soft and grateful.
And so that is what I choose when I can remember.
There is a wave called love and this wave is your life,
Dear one.
And this wave will carry you through the terrain of many an ache.
But if you accept the pull of this love and stop yourself from refusing its journey,
You will find the secret blessing of joy.
You will travel through the intensity to return to the body of the sea,
Exhilarated,
Raw and squeezed.
You will look out at the horizon,
Longing from some impossible depth for the next wave of love to come over the lighted edge of the world.
You will watch it crawl towards you and cry out with gratitude for the next chance to rise on the back of the glorious wave called love.
For you have discovered how to let the expression move through you.
And you have found it is good.
So may we be here fully,
Not guarded or ignorant about where we are going.
May we have both our eyes open,
Accepting the invitation to fall head over heels in love regardless of the grief and the loss.
I will not refuse for I know life is a great wave called love and I am to learn how to stay on without kicking off.
I will remain open,
Willing and receptive.
I will learn to surf the wave called love.
Thank you.
Have a beautiful week.
