Thursday, June 25th, 2009
The ocean days roll…one after the other…some bring you down, some raise you high…and some of the waves pummel you hard on the rocks, making you crawl to shore to heal. But the ocean always reclaims you, and some days you surf…you glide like the smoothest ray of the moon on the waters…and your soul is stilled. And all the while, as you are rocked in the waves of the soul’s waking journey, you feel the soul that also sleeps, so deep beneath the ocean waves that nothing moves. There is only love, untouched by any drowning, unwavered by loss or doubt.
I have noticed how much more life happens when I ride my bike. Not separated by the walls of a car from the world around me, I smell the trees, see the signs, and stop to visit with friends I would only have waved at. I have noticed how much more I feel the rhythm of life when I leave my window open, or say something I could have chosen to conceal…expressing something I could have decided to protect and hide.
For this is all we have…this is our treasure…a collection of moments like a palmful of rubies or a small cup of golden seeds. These are not every moment, but every moment we recognize is our own. Every moment we meet…like a new friend…and make a real connection with. They are every moment we realize we can bring our self into. They are every moment we bring the ruby-gem of our hearts into, and leave a trail of brilliant light behind in. These moments are the ones we drink the juice from. They are the pomegranate moments we get our fingers sticky and forget about time…the cherry moments that we give ourselves to without a plan. These are the moments we drop our defenses, and learn about our true power, and what it can really do…if we just let it do what it already knows how to…what it has always known how to do.
The juice is always there. It wants, even yearns, to be drunk…but it often sits ignored within the fruit we stomp and stumble over on our way somewhere that seems so important at the time. And sometimes it only comes, the moment of awareness and revelation, when we fall…really hard. And we find ourselves swimming in it…our knees dirty in the epic, juiciness and all the other parts that are smeared in with it. We finally lose track. We crack, and the light comes through and shines on the places that have been hurting in darkness. We see a new way…a wayless way…an opening…a letting go that is a course all its own…that will lead you, from the deepest place in your heart, so that you don’t have to try to lead blindly anymore…or keep trying, and trying, and trying…
We are still living out the curse given to Eve, the supposedly shamed but actually empowered goddess of the fruit…and the juice. The goddess of the risk of taking chances, to know. We are still aching for the forbidden fruit. And only the distance we keep from it makes it forbidden to us. Only the fact that we think we are not entitled to partake of it…not just to look upon it with wonder and fear…not just to touch it with trembling fingers…so near to the heart’s yearning…but to pluck it, to put it to our mouths…and to take it in.
It is the power within us that we are most afraid of. The juice itself of that forbidden fruit is only sweetness, and its indulgence all too easy. It is letting ourselves outside of the gates we once built with such fervent and reverent care. It is watching them crumble, and topple stone by stone…it is wondering what we will do outside the lines when we become too big for their boundaries and their once comforting captivity.
…It’s the nakedness. The naked beauty. That beauty we have run from so wildly, and that has pursued us nonetheless, with equal passion…and finally greater passion…overcoming us always, eventually, at last.
And finally there isn’t anything else. We are the juice. We exist in it. It is the warm womb of dark love we came from. It is the oceans of our days, and the waters of our bodies moving in tandem. It is the rush of blood through our hearts, ever washing it, carefully, with love.
Love hard. Love well..and by all means, drink it in.
Love, Jennifer
