Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

When I was about seven, my grandfather gave me a microscope for christmas. I wasn’t very excited. Of course, I didn’t have any idea what the heck it was anyway. It didn’t have colors, or hair to brush, or wheels to roll along smooth wood floors. It didn’t seem to be a very good toy. But then I figured out what it did…and I got a little bit obsessed. I fell in love with looking at things up close, and with light shining through them. There were slides of plant life…seaweed and moss, blood and organisms. On the slide they just looked like colored blobs…but through this magic instrument they became entire worlds, within worlds. They never ended. They were iridescent, translucent…luminous. They had geometries, and voices, and journeys to take you on. And yet they had nothing to say…no doctrine, no promise. Just beauty.

The best of all, though, were the two plates of glass that you could place anything you wanted inside to look at. One day, I put one of my hairs inside. And I was blown away. I found something unlike anything I had ever seen. I found rainbows, on fire. I found luminous copper flashing gold and yellow glints into forever. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I looked, and looked. I wanted to look forever.

This is what we really are. Unnamable rainbows beyond exquisite, beyond beautiful, beyond words. We are light behind glass and color, aching to shine, and be seen. Most of all, by ourselves. If we really and truly knew our own beauty, we could never feel ugly, in any way, ever again. We don’t realize that the bigger picture we long for, is often found by looking very, very closely, at ourselves…carefully, deeply, with plenty of warm light to illuminate our essence. Otherwise, all we see is a lifeless blob of color, pressed inside the glass of this strange human life.

In order to see this dimension of beauty, in ourselves and all things, we need an instrument…like my microscope…which gives us perspective. We need to be willing to open up to the other levels of vision and sensation. We need to peel the protective layer off the screen, that makes everything look more dark, and dull, and heavy. We may feel exposed, but we will actually be stronger and clearer than ever before…

The instrument is the heart. The true heart, when open, sees the truth and beauty of everything. It sounds beautiful to open the heart, but it is much more the brilliant and burning and terrible experience only adventurers would be willing to undertake. For it feels like taking your life in your hands, and casting it to the winds. It feels like putting your faith in nothing, and everything. It feels like trusting something you can’t possibly explain, or even understand. We have to let go of understanding, to let go.

When we set these rainbows free, they change everything we feel and see. We stop trying to change what is outside of us, because what radiates from us already does that for us. We, in fact, begin to trail a rainbow behind us, and lay one out before us, everywhere we go. It is not a beauty we have to seek and obtain, but one we already possess. We just have to find out how not to fear it. It holds, in its very humble hands, all the answers to all the prayers we think we have made in vain. It may speak a language we have never heard…but it also understands everything we have never been able to put into words.

They say we only use a tiny percentage of the power of our brains…and this, I often feel, is how little we know of the enormity of our beauty as well. It is a mostly untapped resource, inhibited by outside impressions and deeply held shames. They are the things we put in a box under a floor board and tried to forget, but what we have really forgotten is that they are treasures. If you blow off the dust you will find gold. Just hold it up close.

Just hold it up close…

hold it up to the light.

May the rainbows slip out of the tips of your fingers and the glints in your eyes, and in doing so, make you the finest mirror in which to see your own gorgeous and radiant beauty.

Love,
Jennifer

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Saturday, January 5th, 2008

We are exposed to so many influences in this world… overstimulated, yet ironically at the same time, often undertouched….

Sometimes we have to make a space around ourselves and find a place within or around us to retreat, so that we can find our own perspective again. For only the true perspective that comes from the heart can really help or guide us. The only influences of true help or assistance from the outside are the ones that point us back to our own hearts, or illuminate something therein.

Today, on a simple drive to do a routine errand, I did not realize how very much was on my mind until I was held suddenly still….arrested momentarily…by the ocean outside the window. In one second…even shorter, in a single instant, it entirely restored my clear perspective. It was like looking directly into my true soul right in front of me. It was beautiful, and turbulent, and beyond reproach. It was beyond assessment, comparison, judgement….it was epic, fear-dispelling, ancient, and wild. It was endless, and complete, and true. We recognized each other, in a heartbeat. And my heart synchronized again, with everything pure and good and right inside of me. Because even a small space of doubt feels large when we are closely wound with our own rhythms. When we feel everything…

Then it becomes like a beat that is just a little off, or something that doesn’t sit right…no matter how long we try to make it, adjusting, and fidgeting, and waiting. We realize, at some crucial moment, that it is just time to move on…not the right place or context for us to thrive.

If you really want to know who I am…just watch me dance. Not just any dance but the kind where the beat has overcome everything else, and only the essence remains. That is the place, beyond words and depictions, where I find absolute freedom and expression. And though there are so many outlets for me…writing, sound, music, speaking…dance includes my body. It offers me complete surrender. And there is nothing…not one thing…to prove. There is no outcome, and no conclusion, and no sought-after resolution. It is complete, like the ocean…like our true soul.

Sometimes only these elements…the windy ocean or an intoxicating beat, can bring us back to the place where no labels apply and no impressions matter but those made when our soul presses up against the universe. And that is all that is left. We all seek reflection, as it is natural to our being, but it is where we seek reflection that makes all the difference in how truly we can find ourselves in it. So often we walk around with the fragmented self-image made by years of outside interpretations of who we are. We make a patchwork quilt of the passion and the guilt and try to stay warm underneath it, when really we have a fire inside that can keep us heated always from within.

But we need reminders, like oxygen to keep our inner fire burning bright…so we don’t lose sight of the true moon like a moth flying endlessly and painfully around a lamp and ignoring the nearby open window and the skies. We need to locate what makes us feel real in order to build the inner strength again that it takes to decide who we are on our own terms instead of someone or something else’s. Sometimes this means we need to remove ourselves, if only even for short periods of time, from the influences that cloud our inner voice and make us feel unsure. We need to be able to step back, take stock, get clear.

We need to hear the wind, and find out what it says when we let it blow right through our ribs, and there are no other noises to cover up that song. We need to find what is revealed when everything else disappears, or grows quiet…or dark. And though we sometimes have long periods of this in our lives, it doesn’t have to take more than an afternoon…or ten minutes…or a drive by the ocean on a windy day.

One winter I lived for a month on a small island in the middle of the mediterranean, and the winds would start blowing every evening, shaking the doors and the shutters all night long. I would stand sometimes, at twilight, looking at the endless-seeming seas, and feel that the winds had traveled from europe, and africa, and the middle east, and were all melding and becoming one in the air of this magical place. I felt the perspective of being right in the center of, and yet far-enough removed from everything. It was like a pause button had been pushed on my life, and I was standing in mid-air…without falling. We always have this inner sanctuary, touched by all and yet freed from association with any, but by free choice and invocation.

May you find this island inside…these true reflections, and sources of ever-present deep remembering.

From my heart to yours,
Jennifer

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