Lao Tzu wrote 25 centuries ago,
Who can make the muddy water clear?
Let it be still and it will gradually become clear.
I took this to mean that if we become still enough,
Our dirt settles to the bottom and stays there,
Leaving us clear water.
Now I understand it differently.
The mud that fills the glass,
The glass that is our body,
Does not sink as we become more aware.
It rises to the surface instead.
It means what was hidden below forces its way up through the water of us,
Clouding the glass before it passes through.
Before the water clears,
The mud must rise.
I have come to believe the silt lifting from the floor of you,
Obscuring everything you thought you'd settled,
Is not a sign that something is wrong.
It's the first sign that something is waking and attempting to move out of you.
The water gets murkier as it becomes more honest.
What was resting at the bottom undisturbed and invisible is finally getting the chance to move up and out of your container.
It stirs to be seen before it spills out of you.
This is what it felt like when a cloudy swirl of dark dust rose in front of me the other day.
It was a little vein of self-deception I wasn't aware was running through my waters.
An innocent lie that began to unmistakably take shape through the murk.
Writing in my journal,
Two questions surfaced.
Where have you been saying,
I don't know,
When what you mean is,
I don't know how?
Where have you been turning away from a doorway you know you must go through?
I've been telling myself that I feel lost,
That the maps are unmarked and lead nowhere,
That in my lostness I can't possibly know what's next.
And for years,
A dream has come,
Like a bird tapping at the window.
On many levels,
I have been denying it and refusing to engage it fully.
The map is not clear,
That part is true,
But the doorway has long been marked.
I am simply resistant to entering.
Instead of taking a risk and daring to push open,
I've been standing in front of the door,
Narrating my confusion and the fog of my not knowing.
The lie I've been telling is,
I don't know.
But the truth is,
I don't know how.
I'm not sure how I'm going to get there.
How am I going to bring this dream into this body?
How am I going to grow into someone capable of meeting what the dream asks of me?
How am I going to embody what I feel is mine to embody?
I have sat at the foot of the same cedar tree and made the same prayer.
May the mystery have its way with me.
May it guide me where I am needed and called.
I have felt something like wings move inside me,
A great light taking up more and more space,
Urging me toward territories I'm not certain I can survive entering.
There's a momentum growing as if something in me is trying to lift into flight.
And at the very same time,
I grip certain pieces of myself in place.
My quiet requests under the tree have felt deeply sincere,
But fear rises when I imagine losing the comfort of my familiar world.
The furniture arranged just so,
The life I know how to manage.
The dark earth begins to move with insights and urges,
Ways to move forward.
And at the first sight of the sprout,
I cover it with dirt.
So perhaps the prayer is not,
Have your way with me.
Perhaps the prayer is,
Show me how I'm blocking myself from following through with what I already know.
How often,
I wonder,
Are we obscuring our own knowing because what we're actually afraid of is entering or exiting the rooms we know we are meant to move through?
Something in us decides it's safer not to look too closely.
That way we can stand in front of the door and never have to open it.
Where are we protecting ourselves from what we already know?
Where are we telling ourselves we are lost or without direction when in truth we are more afraid to step forward and find out what waits both inside us and on the other side of the door?
It's easy to see how this happens.
When we are faced with the daunting reality of moving toward a horizon we can't yet see,
There are great obstacles.
At dawn in the forest everything is shadow,
Shapes lumped together in an impossible weave of darkness.
We enter the wood and all we can see are menacing forms,
Patterns that seem to obstruct the light.
When something new is emerging,
Offshoots of things we must encounter before we're able to pull the dream down into our bodies begin to branch out around us.
Fears and uncertainties,
Insecurities and resistance,
Walls that feel as though they have gnashing teeth.
But beloved,
This is not new.
This has been life since the very first time you opened your blurry little eyes.
Was the shape before you a threat or was it the face and sound of a mother who would love you?
Perhaps it was both.
From the very beginning,
You have moved toward forms that could both harm and love.
The rose draws blood.
The river can drown.
The tree tears your sleeve as you pass.
This is an old story.
And so the little lies appear dressed as truth.
You begin to convince yourself you don't know because the road is long and the shadows cross every path.
It feels rational to wait,
To hesitate until the sun is high and the way is fully lit.
Some small guardian in you says,
Wait for noon,
For certainty,
For the light to burn every shadow off the ground.
But if you wait for high noon,
You will soon see that the light wanes and dusk falls again.
There is no stopping yourself from having to walk down dark,
Unmarked trails.
Unless you never go at all,
And that too is a choice,
An option.
But it does not ensure safety.
Choices made from fear often only create more fear.
I feel grateful more than anything else when I am finally able to see the face of a shadowy guest inside me that hasn't been telling the whole truth.
I take it to mean that whatever work I've been doing on myself and with the mystery has been clearing my water.
When we're able to see through the stirred mud,
That mud has a chance to clear now.
I took this discovery to mean I am becoming more honest,
And so too is the water I live in.
Living.
Something in me was ready to tell the truer truth.
To tell the truth is to take the hand of something within you that's capable of walking through the door and into the woods regardless of the time of day,
Accompanied by the sound of something bright and honest inside you set against everything else.
There is an impulse in each of us that doesn't want to move toward anything,
Not life,
Not each other,
Not ourselves.
The impulse is to stay put and call ourselves,
Lost and without direction.
We close our ears to hearing and our eyes to seeing,
When a few simple words can save us from ourselves.
I am afraid.
And I do not yet know how,
But I know.
There's always something we know.
Even if it's only the faintest breath of truth,
There's always a choice asking to be embodied.
It's not just one large dream I've been seeing,
There are many small ones.
And when I say dream,
I mean quiet insistences that could bring me closer to my life.
Sometimes it's a gesture I could make,
A meal I could bring my elderly neighbors.
A way of softening toward my husband or receiving my children instead of managing them.
And sometimes the knowing asks something far more intimate,
Like inhabiting more fully a body that is changing.
To remain close to a body that is in pain.
To sit beside what is disappearing before my eyes and not look away.
These small insistences often turn to refusals,
Leaving me living slightly above or slightly beside the life that's asking to be entered.
It can seem that I spend more energy deflecting the call than answering it.
Sometimes it's as simple as,
Wash this dish more slowly.
And even that I can refuse.
Life has a way of asking for what we're not always comfortable giving.
It's not that we don't hear it,
But that we'd rather skim the water and skate across its surface instead of deepening into it and lowering ourselves down.
I fear it will cost me more than I can give.
What is being asked is how close we're willing to get in any given moment.
My practice of sitting with the trees has revealed this more clearly than anything else.
To go and sit beneath them,
Is to enter a kind of nearness I've grown unfamiliar with.
It's a closeness to the voice of the earth,
To the sound of a single pine tree moving in the wind.
I do not resist the tree once I am there,
I resist the going in the first place.
At first it can feel almost unnatural to join in the simplicity of the tree's life,
Like grabbing air by the ankles and trying to root it into the earth.
To move toward a tree,
Or to ourselves really,
Is to move against the momentum of distraction and distance that feels larger than us most days.
A counterforce drawing us away from our depths.
We are all swimming in that water,
So the deepening can feel like too much work.
Thich Nhat Hanh said,
What we most need to do is hear within us the sound of the earth crying.
But to hear the earth cry is to allow myself to feel,
And feeling is not a small thing.
This kind of closeness asks that I land and listen,
And that I let myself be touched by what is here,
And that's not always easy.
I'm not always willing to break myself open and to give that much of myself.
The tenderness hidden here is our fear of contact.
Somewhere I learned that to lean fully into life,
To love it,
To answer it,
To embody what I feel called toward risks,
Hurt and disappointment,
And sometimes even betrayal,
There is a real fear of not being met.
So it makes sense that I would rather stand at the threshold and call my pause uncertainty,
Call it waiting.
But really I know I am only avoiding it as a way to guard my heart.
All the while the knowing waits and never leaves,
And new requests and dreams gather,
But they get sanctioned to some upper room,
With a door that is rarely opened.
The wisdom and the call are both here,
But to open that door would mean letting it descend into my body,
Into my hands,
Into my actual living.
We can become attached to the question itself.
To the search and to the longing.
There is something strangely safe about remaining in inquiry.
As long as we're asking,
We are not yet accountable to act.
If I can stay in my wandering place,
I do not have to risk finding anything out.
The question becomes a way of hiding,
A form of avoidance.
While the answer,
Which would require embodiment,
Waits.
The dream hovers above instead of being drawn down into the body like a child into the womb.
To bring the dream into the body is one of the most vulnerable acts a human can make.
It is to dare to bring something tender forward,
Small pieces at a time with patience as it forms.
Something in you that you do not fully know and must come to know.
It is to bring into the world a part of yourself you hope will be loved and received.
Ursula K.
Le Guin wrote,
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so it lives.
My resistance to closeness is a resistance to the daily dying of the forest,
The way it gives itself to decay and to new life.
In my unwillingness to change or be changed,
I erode small parts of myself one by one.
To live as the forest lives,
To die as it dies,
Is to give shape to the fragile love that beckons from the edges of awareness.
Asking whether we will carry it down into the world through our own imperfect hands.
The dream would not be in your eye if it were not yours to tend.
It would not make itself known if it were not being asked of you.
We do not see it by accident,
We see it because we are capable of bringing it into form.
Somewhere in the room with you and this dream,
There is a small,
Obvious step you already know is yours to take,
But are maybe refusing.
There's a good chance you're telling yourself you cannot hear or see the next step,
And perhaps you can.
The door is quiet and close to you.
And to open it,
All you must do is admit that you are afraid,
Not lost.
Cautious but not off course.
Doubting but not forsaken.
Shaking,
But not without footing.
Hesitant,
But not without heart.
To tell the truth is to take the hand of something that will walk through the door with you.
I will not call myself lost when I am afraid.
I will call it by its name.
And then trembling.
I will begin.
And in the beginning,
The water begins to clear.
Thank you as always for being here,
For listening.
I look forward to our next time together.
Until then,
May we tell the truth.
Be well.
