Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Outside my window the sun is laying a golden fabric over everything, and softening the chilly winds that kick up crisp leaves, and let them softly drop again.  The air is so very clean I feel that I could drink it.  All of the sudden everything seems so very easy…and I can barely move.

When I do move it is as if I am watching myself from a distance…wondering how it is that I am putting one foot in front of the other without even meaning to really.  I am once again in awe of the way that life unfolds, surprising you at every turn.  Even the feelings you expect are so ever-changing, always with something new to teach you.

I have been home for three nights and two days, and I still wake up wondering what city I am in and what kind of day I need to be ready for.  I still dream of Venetian canals and living sculptures…and of Delphi.  Always of Delphi.  And then I realize I made it home, by some miracle of nature it was waiting for me at the end of another very long road.  It seems so unchanged, and at the same time I am fully aware that it is a blank canvas for me to begin a new life within.  I sit, in repose, wondering what I want this new life to be like.

I think we forget what we would like to create and be in this world because we forget to stop and dream about it.  To stop.  To pause and reflect.  We think of this time taken in rest as nothing more than empty space not put to good use, but truthfully it is the womb of our power of creation, inspiration and joy.  We have to take precious time to ourselves, and not just to sleep or eat.  To be.  To let go.  To feel.  And nothing more.  We don’t think this is productive time, and it is not…it is instead what is literally vital to being productive, and to producing that which is most aligned with our soul’s desire.

So I am not making plans yet or leaping into the future.  I am just sitting here, quietly…considering.  I am making space for the dreams to find me, rather than forcing them to come at my calling.  I am letting the playful space of being open be my dream, and its fulfillment.

I don’t have answers, because even the questions keep slipping through my fingers and falling away.  And I am glad.  It leaves just me, and the great silence, and putting one foot in front of the other with patience and faith.  It lets me look, only and truly, at what is at hand.  No reaching.  No striving.  Only a natural movement made from the yearning of my being, to be that.

It isn’t a secret to live this way.  It is about noticing the wind pick up the leaves and let them go again.  It is about tasting the flavor in your cup of tea.  It is about spending a longer time doing nothing important by outer standards, and finding out what is important to your heart again.  It is about strolling.  Going nowhere.  Leafing through magazines or talking about silly things that make your heart feel light.  It is about rolling over, sometimes with your last strength, and depositing yourself into the arms of the goddess, and just letting yourself be held, without thinking about it.  It is about skipping school sometimes, and school’s later equivalents in our lives.  It is about taking unexpected chances, to walk alone in the trees and hear what they might have to say to you, when there is no other sound but the soft turnings-over of your mind.

May you be blessed, in this day, in this week, to find yourself in many of those moments, stringing them together like berries on a line, until you can’t remember where they start…and where they end…

Love, Jennifer

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 ~ Venezia, Italia

(this is the continuation of a travel journal that begins with the September 10th entry further below…)

Finally, my friends, I feel more free again.  I have decided that it isn’t enough to just board a plane for some exotic or glamerous location.  If you don’t have free time you are just as trapped as you would be anywhere else in the world.  Sometimes you want to pack your days with one activity after the other…it’s fun…but when it has stopped being fun it becomes a grind, like any other.  I have designed my life to be free of the grind so I certainly don’t want to search the world for it.

So to just wander around Venice for hours and hours is heaven sent.  To sit by the Grand Canal when your feet are tired from walking day after day, and to just go wherever you want to, without any destination, is pure poetry.  I don’t ever get tired of little canal after little canal.  Though I will be so ready to come home that I can barely think about it, there is just nothing in the world like this city.

It was so incredible to tone here for a group of about eighteen people who usually meet to meditate.  I remembered what marble and water do for sound, and it is epic.  And to feel the energy rising up from the land and water here was ecstatic, and made the most hauntingly beautiful sounds.

I am going now to see Piazza San Marco at night…I will send you all a gentle breeze from my favorite plaza in the world…

Love, Jennifer