The shape of sound – cicadas’ buzz rippling in the air
The shape of shadow – falling angles of light from the house windows
The shape of breath – cylindrical ribcage expansive, circular, contracting ribbons of bone
The shape of flower blossoms – doubled, orange begonias in an arc of crumpled fabric
The shape of sky – between leaves and branches, inverted butterflies
The shape of trees – moving in a wind I can’t feel
The shape of the hawk – rocketing out of the pine, arcing behind the house
The shape of space between the stars of succulents – always three curved angles
The shape of me? What shape do I make in the evening sky descending its shadowy deep blue light against my skin?
The shape of love – sometimes close, sometimes spacious – always pulsing, the vibrations rippling toward infinity.
There is so much to discover when we meditate on Shape.
Find your sit-spot. Just Be.
Notice the shape of sound, of texture, of air, of breath.
What shape do you make in the gorgeous sky?
What shapes are blossoming between your fingers, the lashes of your eyes, the parting of your lips, the curving angles of your sweet and precious toes, the arc of your nose?
What space, what shape does love make and take up in your living?
How is your heart’s spaciousness rippling toward infinity?
I spent a month sitting under my magnolia tree. Not a month straight. A month of mornings. And it changed the way I live. On the inside.
Several years ago I completed a meditation teacher training that prepared me to teach meditation to young people in schools. It was another jump into one of the “deep” ends of meditation, as people say, and it was glorious. Glorious in its supportive container, its approach, framing, and guiding – an abundance of wisdom and a swaddling of fellow travelers along the path. We had head-teachers, cohort guides, and companions. We all taught and learned from each other.
After I completed my practicum and received my certification, I celebrated by getting my nose pierced. And after our final online gathering I felt the emptiness of losing that nest, the organized safety net with its deadlines and accountability, it’s scheduled gatherings and required reflections. I felt the lack of those supports and routines immediately – an unmooring. I didn’t want my new way of being to fade, so I decided I would meditate every morning for thirty minutes. And I did.
I’m doing that again to create a book for us. Something we can hold to help us remember that we are humans being in the midst of all our doing. I’ll post some pieces here and hope you’ll share some feedback to help me craft what is most needed for your own dive into the deep.
When you hold one hand in another there is a heaviness that is both light and solid
your hand, I mean, I’m talking about when you hold the weight of your own hand
resting one hand inside the other a nesting
Try it now ~
Cupping your hands one inside the other sense the weight of you
sense the weight of tenderness.
How tender is your care for your own sweet self?
Try resting your shoulders and arms and let them be pulled toward the earth…
Allow the gentle downward force of gravity to be a soothing balm like you’re setting down every single thing you carry every single day
the things you hold even in the night in your sleep you’re carrying them ~
Just for now, just for this moment, set down what you are carrying.
Try this ~
Notice the sensation of your feet resting against the ground the grass the growing world.
Notice the sensation of your hips resting in the seat of your chair that’s resting against the ground the grass the growing world.
Notice the way the crown of your head is floating into the sky even as the the sides of your neck are softening the tops of your shoulders sinking and your arms elbows arms wrists hands fingers are moving closer to the ground the grass the growing world.
Notice the sensation of being held by creation.
Even as your body stretches upward with each of your breaths your body relaxes downward with each of your breaths
You are a growing being resting against the ground the grass the growing world.
So as you nest your hand inside your hand, become the tender loving care of the creation that holds you because you are what you have always longed for. You belong to your own dear, sweet, and precious self, a gift, from you to you.
Just for fun? Try this~
Notice if you’d like to switch the nest of your hands allowing the other hand to be the cradle of tenderness and loving care.
Feel the difference. It is new. Awkward. Lighter Maybe? It is similar. Odd. Fun Maybe?
Switch them back if you’d like. Notice the ways you are opening into choice, ease, and freedom inside the frame of this earth and sky, this greening grounding growing world.
You get to chose what your hands hold. You get to chose which things you pick back up. You get to chose to lift with your legs instead of your back. You can allow the earth to lift you and all the things you choose to carry.
Remember that as much weight as presses down on her, the sweet, dear earth pushes back up just as much.
You are not alone.
How do you feel now? What do you notice most? What is resonating deep inside you? What mysterious door have you walked through?
What is challenging you and what are the judgements your mind offers?
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?
Generous Wisdom | Spacious Heart 