(alternately titled “Moss Breath”)
Monday, July 7th, 2008
The other night at the sauna, as I gave myself over to the heat and felt it wrap its burning fingers around the last cool flesh on my body, I wanted to cry. It’s not that it really caused me pain…it just hurt inside to let go. It just hurt to feel the ever-present ache…of being alive. Not the ache that comes from challenge and suffering, but the one that comes from being constantly overwhelmed by beauty. The sad, gorgeous, splendid, ecstatic, desperate heartbeat of beauty inside everything. The beauty that comes around the last corner you think is devoid of it, and takes your breath away.
I have lived long, and hard, and many, many times. I am older than the wind and the sun. If you could see my age, I would appear to you like a tree that has been growing since the beginning of time…and even before. I have watched it all, the rise and the fall, and having seen it all I am still not numb to the waves…and hope I never will be. For all the sorrow, I wouldn’t miss the experience of feeling everything for anything in the world. It has torn me apart, and made me whole, too many times to ever count. It has taken me to the place I think I can never return from, and somehow, every single time, brought me home.
My heart.
I think we think we can iron out the final wrinkle one day, and we will be perfect. We will have achieved immunity to all things difficult and dark. But I have only found one way to the gentle path…through. And though other vessels have been hailed as more perfect, it is only the heart…the ever-changing, wildly truthful and painfully alive heart, that I trust. It is like riding a motorcycle with a blindfold on. Scary, and probably insane. But when you know your roots are in the time before time, there is no other choice. All other paths only loop back to the path of the heart, and you have taken them all now…so you know.
So now when I think I can’t face another beautiful, aching moment, I press my body to the ground, or lift it to the sound of hard beats, or take it out into the forest, and enough solace fills me to bring me back…to my senses. My senses bring me back to my heart. I come back to myself. Over and over and over. I am the ocean, constantly rolling onto myself and receding. It is the breath of my being, and I no longer fear or try to tame it. I know it is beyond my control, and I know it has a wisdom I must trust. I don’t want to control the ocean. I want to roll in the waves. I want to give my body to water and instinct. I want to fade and shine, rise and fall, ache and be soothed. Until the ocean is quiet, and my time embodied is done. I have been a warrior many times, and I don’t want to fight anymore. Only trust. I have so much power, fire, and light…if I use it to surrender…just imagine what can happen.
Some friends and I went into the woods recently, and found a magical land of moss where the earth was made of fallen trees. No matter where you walked, you couldn’t know if it would be solid, or if you would fall right through the decomposing wood floor beneath you. The ground was shaped with the rounds of trees becoming new trees, upon even older trees becoming earth, and solid was liquid…and decay was beautiful.
I began to walk along a mossy fallen tree. I found that it was solid, and began to walk with assuredness along its green body…until suddenly it was soft beneath my bare feet. Like dough. Like a body. So I began to move along it with the care that comes from not presuming anything about what I would find there, and instead of it being disconcerting it felt comforting to walk that way. It felt like the way you can walk through life, if you begin to imagine that its inconsistencies and surprises are welcome friends that allow you to walk softly. And walking softly, with little expectation, is an exquisite experience, in which you come to know a different, deeper kind of strength. I found that I could adapt, and experiment with everything I thought I knew, and I found that I loved that ability. I found that the soft heart of the tree, though it couldn’t hold me, was like my own soft heart, and I didn’t need it to hold me. I found that the hard strength of trees is built on a vulnerability that manifests when its time as form is done, and it is ready to be new again.
And the moss spoke quietly to us all, in green tones, soft, hushed and ancient. It spoke in emerald feathers and cushioned stone. It breathed…and we breathed with it…
May these catalytic times be touched with the kind of strength born of infinite softness, may your heart waves destroy and resuscitate you, only to the point that it saves your life, and may the decay of what has left your life, be the luminous floor of the forest-mansion of your soul.
Love, Jennifer
