Sunday, August 8th, 2010
It is a Sunday and the sun is soft outside, but I am hiding from it in my room to steal back a little time from everything but my teacup and my music and the words I want to write. There will be sun tomorrow.
There is a tree I am in love with. The most singular thing about it is the fact that it is dying, and yet I have never seen a tree with more life in it for that very reason. It is a burnt-golden-orange madrona tree, and madrona trees turn silver when they die. It has one remaining living massive branch, and I sat with it for hours the other day. I watched, fascinated and totally lost in the place just where the orange was turning silver…where death and life were meeting.
I know there is a lot going on right now. I know there always is, and I know it only gets more intense. I know what it’s like to want to run from it all…run free. I know there are always the overlapping words of a million people’s ideas about what you should prepare for…always what is coming next. It has been this way a great long while…this is nothing new. I also know that we are always on that edge of life and death, though we may know it not. We may not always allow ourselves to be aware of it, but every breath we have is precious and we have far less to lose than we think we do in being alive enough to feel it. Even death bestows the kind of endless gifts I can’t give words to. But a life unlived…lived in fear…this is a tradgedy of truly great proportions.
I am not saying, nor will I ever say, that there isn’t a place for all of what we each go through…every fear and every constraint we place upon ourselves is sacred. It may have been so long since we let go that we aren’t sure how to do it anymore, though we pray for it daily as our arms begin to waver and shake under the heavy weight we seem to have agreed to carry. There is only one thing. One thing to remember. You are held and nothing will ever happen as it should not. You can open your arms because whatever you drop will be caught. We were not designed to carry heavy weight. We were not designed as beasts of burden. No beast was. We were designed to be playful and free all the lengths of our lives. We were designed to be creative and to love, and to feel joy course through our veins. We were designed to be wild. Domestication has left us with no home for our instincts, and no expression of the raw soul that wants to rip through every binding that holds us back from being what we most naturally are. Natural is something hidden under all the layers of conditioning we have come to know as reality in this world.
Only thing is, the world is changing. It is beginning inside of you. All the rules are changing too. They are dissolving at the speed of light and we are left only with their empty shells on the shore of a new way of being as we walk, pick one up, look at its fading colors, and let it drop again. Only we know what waits for us on that new shore, and beyond it. And the place we know it from is buried too. Buried deep inside us in the place where we most truly know anything. We will have to get close to that place we had almost forgotten we put it. We will have to grieve at that graveside perhaps as we imagine something has died, and it may only be through tears that we suddenly realize something may live yet, and we can start digging. And then we won’t be able to think of anything else. We will dig until we are sore, we will dig through the night, we will dig with our bare hands, blindly, losing sight of all else, until the treasure of what we have hidden is ours again. Until we remember our brilliance. Because we are meant to shine like stars, like wild diamonds, and though this world has not been ready to handle such burning brilliance…it will be. And until it is we can remember how to burn again inside our own beings…we can remember how to find and become the wild star that we are…
But we must trust a deeper rhythm…something only found within, in order to access this shocking light of illuminated self-love and freedom. The other day I brought out my drum for the first time in a couple of years and I thought about what it means to be in rhythm. You have to let go of having the perfect beat to find it. You have to be unafraid of “messing up” and being “off” as many times as you need to in order to enter into deep trust in yourself, peace and total acceptance of who you are. You have to find, in life and in your heart as with drumming, your own rhythm, until you hear it like the blood pumping through your veins…and then you simply must answer to it…because it is what you know more than anything else, to be true.
Run away today. It isn’t always cowardice or distraction. It isn’t always avoidance or denial. It can be the un-locked door and the direct passage from where you may be bound, to your own rhythm. Forget what you meant to do today, or tomorrow, or any day that you can, and run free like water rushes over stones…like breezes sing through leaves. Go where your heart is called, rather than where you feel obliged to go or where it “makes sense” to accomplish your next goal. Make little spaces where you run free. They will grow. Soon your world will be an open sky…
Love, Jennifer
