Prose – Generous Wisdom | Spacious Heart

You Are Nature & Standing in the Midst

Look at your hands.
They are blossoms, your fingers, petals.
Look at your feet.
They, too, open and close,
your toes, each one, precious petals
it doesn’t matter
they curved, crooked and callused
when the magic happened inside of you,
the energetic core of you
the magic always happening.

Look at you. You are the interstices of love and itself,
deep inside this web of life
you stand in the inbetween.
You are the intersection of all and everything,
You know, the love and the Love
in the midst of it
and still at the same time
you are a dusty star
like me
because we are in the midst of it
we are nothing and everything together
floating on the spectrums of spanda,
expanding and contracting along
the continuums of impermanence
cosmic and miniscule
exploding and swaddling
always together alone
and
alone together.

Between games I found a metropark and spent my time in the grass, with all the ants. On the earthy soil along the river with all the stones. Beside all the growing things with all the roots, and I was growing, too.

My 16-year-old soccer player rested in the air-conditioned car after one too many ants interrupted her napping. I bathed in the air coming from the water, leaves, bark, branches, and blossoms. They were everywhere, all the growing things. And when I looked down – me(!) I was growing, too. Just like you. Right now. This very moment.

Impermanence keeps swelling up in my awareness, whether I like it or not. Sometimes I love it. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes joy, sometimes grief. Always bittersweet.

These little pink and yellow blossoms might not be there if I were to go back today. But maybe they would be. And either scenario would be just fine.

I noticed a lot of things on my walk through the woods, like how the deer cut paths I don’t want to follow, and how the river lays sea shells on the sand where there is no sea and there is no sand. I noticed, too, how humans interact with each other, and I all can say is this: to be understood is the greatest gift one sweet person and give to another.

I watched two people from different generations and different cultures smile and laugh as they signed to each other with their hands and fingers. I watched dads and babies at the edge of the Olentangy acknowledge the mess of water and soil. I watched myself proclaim to a mom that her self-assured young boy would be very wise one day.

I walked through these family-centered woods alone, my own four kids and husband spread out in various places, resting, playing, working, being in their individual days. But I am never alone. I thought to myself, “This young mom has no idea I have kids, 21, 16, 14, and 13. I’m just walking through these trees “free,” with my arms swinging slowly by my sides, and my hands “empty.”

She couldn’t see my what my hands used to hold. She couldn’t see my heart, not with her eyes. If she could, she would’ve known things about me because my heart is bulbous and bursting with all those beings inside of it: My children, T, S, E, D, and my husband, J, and the puppy, B. My heart is soft and squishy and malleable. My heart gets callused and blistered, gorgeous biologic bandages sloughing off in time. My heart grows and shrinks, and expands and contracts with love and fear and all the things a human can feel.

When my daughter and I were lying on blankets in the weedy grass beneath the maple trees, the ants embraced us. I watched them and thought, “If I were a horse, would I mind? Would I know? If I were a cow, would I notice, would I care?

“The ants are crawling on me, and I am lying on the earth. I am in it. I am not separate.

Then I offered my teenager the air-conditioned mini-van so that she could rest. I have spent hours and hours playing yoga shapes outside under the sky. I built up a capacity for discomfort and annoyance. I have a high ant tolerance now. I chose this.

Freedom does not exist
outside of me.
I used to think it did.
I used to think I could reach outside myself, control external forces,
control everything, everywhere and get to freedom.

But when I realized
I couldn’t feed a baby breakfast
before I’d fed her dinner,
I set out to find
ease
and realized I needed to recruit
allowing
and it took a
looooooong
long time to find.

Freedom, maybe, exists within the self-organized structures of the smallest bits of us – quarks and antiquarks, mesons and hadrons, stability lying beneath storminess; protons, neutrons, baryons, sort of like the “organized chaos” of the Montessori working, learning, playing house, string theory and chaos theory intersecting all over the place.

I’m not saying I like ants crawling on my skin. It’s just that I’d rather feel easeful instead of irritated. And I think freedom exists in my choice to allow them to crawl from the grass to my blanket to my foot. I guess I think freedom exists in choices. Even when those choices are controlled by forces other than me.

I chose to lie down on the ground, an hour from my house where the ants live all the moments of their lives. I chose to play around in yoga shapes on the grounds of the local art center where I know ants have lived forever.

I still choose to sit beneath the magnolia tree in my backyard where I know some ants spend some of their time. I don’t choose to invite them inside my bedroom, though. I don’t allow them to walk through the window beside my pillow. So there’s some dis-ease there in that tension. I got a little freaked out when I couldn’t stop the flow of ants beside my sleeping face. (Yeah, I took steps to rectify that.)

All this is to say that I Just want you to know that you are nature. and by know I mean feel. And by feel I mean experience. Experience that you are nature and you are good. Your humanness is goodness.

I feel my best when I remember
I burst out into the world from the world.
My eyes, mouth, hands, feet, gut, mind, heart
opening and closing and opening again,
rhythmically,
dawn, day, dusk, dark.

My body is made of earth and stars
just like my mother’s body is of the earth and stars.
We are constellations on the ground,
my ancestors and I, you and I, all of us.
From the world into the world.
Humans in all of our humanness.

Are you standing in the midst with me?
What does your gut say?
Your heart?
Your mind?
Your body-heart-mind?
What does all of you say?

What Happens When Joy Fills You?

Do you break open? Do you fall down? Do you float away?

Are we vessels for joy? Maybe. And, like, a lot of others things, too, right? Like pain and despair and incredulousness and dignity, honor, pride, grief, and boredom, and…

We carry EVERYTHING.

Joy makes us feel alive I think. It feels like the opposite of pain (most times). Sometimes joy makes us cry, though. And sometimes joy can hurt – even though it’s the opposite of hurtful – because it’s all wrapped up in more than one experience, more than one moment. Joy is bittersweet with remembering and pride and impermanence, layers of dark chocolate with raspberries. Maybe.

What was the last thing that filled you with joy?

Some people describe joy as “really really really super happy.” But, you know, happiness comes and goes. Other people describe joy as the thing that is always there because it exists outside of time and space. It’s like this all-pervasive essence because it doesn’t come from material things; it comes from spiritual things. Even if you don’t believe in spirit.

For me, joy is that lasting thing that exists all the time. It is a brightness. It flashes and sparks. It’s like that emoji with three 4-pointed stars of varying sizes.

So, joy’s always there, but it swells. Joy SWELLS. Are you thinking of the ocean? Yeah, I think it’s kinda like that, like waves.

The most recent thing that filled me with joy was watching a genius musician THRILL at the awesomeness of another musician’s art. Watching a musician experience another musician’s song and appreciating the hell out of it is magical for me. I feel it in my face around my mouth where I can’t stop smiling. I feel it in my forehead around my eyes where my brows are lifting. I feel it in my chest around my heart where my blood is pumping.

This also happens to me when I see a writer in awe at another writer’s words. But it’s a little quieter. I feel this kind of joy settling in my gut and connecting me to the chair, and pressing me into the floor. It’s because of the depth.

Those practiced musicians, writers, artists, they know what it takes to create. They understand technique, nuance, texture, tone, subtly, craft, discipline, decision, inspiration, failure, serendipity, dryness, synchrony, expression – which is connection, to self outside of self where you can see it from a different angle. Artists know when something feels unfinished. They know when something feels complete. They know because they live it, too. And they know what happens when they collaborate – WOW – everything is multiplied.

That’s really what joy is: depth and connection – depth and connection that expands and sparkles. Joy is not a surface thing. It bursts from the deepest places and brightens the skies in its explosion.

Joy is not an alone thing either. I mean, I can experience joy when I encounter the scent of wild onions, but it’s not about the scent of wild onions, you know? It’s about the first time I remember smelling wild onions, one of the first times I remember connecting with the earth, so it’s me and the earth. The joy is reliving that connection. In reliving that connection I’m also connecting to another version of My Self. I am re-membering myself, putting myself back together. And because those kinds of moments are so powerful, they exist outside of time. I know there are neurological explanations for this, but I don’t care about any of that right now. In this moment, I don’t care about the explanation.

I want to be
in joy.
Inside it.
I want to create joy
and receive the joy that I create.
I want to thrill at someone else’s joy,
and I want to bring our joys together.
That’s where art is. Even when it hurts
I want joy to swell up from the depths of me and
knock me over so many
waves in the ocean on the shore in the sun
in the morning in the rain in the bright
and glowing dusk of change.

I am a curving vase.
I am emptying at the same time
I am filling,
water holding dying flowers
at the same time I am filling,
dirt holding living flowers

I am dying and living

I am paying attention

I am filling up

I am breaking open

I am remembering and reliving and receiving and
I am
So
Deep
In it
I am
Outside of it,
the vase
I am inside the flowers
I am the water
and the dirt
and the emptiness
I am EVERYTHING

What does joy mean to you?
What does it feel like – if you could reach out and touch it, or lift it into your arms and carry it – what does it feel like?
Where do the sensations of joy show up in your body?
What do those sensations feel like in your muscles? in your bones?

What makes you joyful; what fills you with joy?
What kinds of joy do you create, in your mind and with your hands?
How much joy can you hold before it spills out of your eyes and breaks you into pieces even as it puts you back together?

Joy and gratitude are different,
but my, my, my are they the same.
When you go so deep into the present,
you touch the everlasting instant.