“Today, it is enough. It is enough to know the sun awoke. It is enough to know my waning cats stayed one more day. It is enough to know I am loved.
I lack nothing today. Money, food, praise, warmth. Large amounts of anything hold no meaning. The right amount, the balanced amount, the amount I can fully use today, it is all here. I lack nothing today. Tomorrow, regardless of my mood, I will lack nothing as well.
I am cared for and I care for others. I give and I receive. I speak and I am silent. Water flows. Leaves blow. Clouds roll in and out. It is enough.
There is no wanting. There is no yearning. Passion settles. Peace floats. My walk is grounded, steady. I am loved. And it is enough.”
Right now, in this very moment, I am soaring high on possibility and potential. After months of transition and uncertainty, equilibrium is finding me again. It’s not over yet, changes and endings and beginnings are still rolling through. But I’m not resisting, not putting up walls, not trying to control. Right now it just feels good to drive down the street with the window down, music blasting, a smile on my face and peace in my heart.
No, nothing is perfect. My life is still more upside down than right side up, and there is a long road ahead – but I am full of hope, full of optimism, full of faith that it will all be as it should be.
“Almost everything that has been done in the world - the most beautifully healing and the most horrifically destructive - has been done by normal people who hold strong values and wanted to do what is best.”
“I have never met a fairy-tale-style bad guy who really wanted to do the wrong thing, for no reason. What I have met are hundreds of hurting people trying to make sense of things; and when I find out why and how they were raised, what they’re up against today - all the rest makes sense to me. Where once I saw lack of ethics, now I see strongly held values. Where once I saw ignorance, now I see deeply engraved experiences. Where once I saw hardheartedness, now I see a feeling, living soul.”
After you soak in Catherine’s wisdom, take a quick peak over at Jen Lemen’s again and see a small sampling of the love notes she made to leave around her city. She is a woman who takes action instead of just talking - any wonder she’s one of my heros?
I’d like to think I’d be one of the people who would have gone up to this guy without hesitation or reservation and given and received a hug. But would I? Would I have gone with my gut, or would I have been so tied up in social convention and our ‘don’t touch’ society that I would have passed him by with a snicker and a look of amused condescension on my face. And if I had done that – what would I have lost?
Nothing perhaps, after all it would have just been a random moment, quite likely quickly forgotten as I got swept up in the all-consuming mundanities of daily life. But I would have lost something, something small but profound. I would have lost the infinitely precious opportunity for real connection with another human being.
The seclusion and separateness with which we live our lives creates a seemingly insurmountable division between us. And if this distance often seems too wide to cross with people we love, it seems near impossible with the countless people who pass in and out of our lives on a daily basis.
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. “
Mother Teresa
We can’t connect with everyone, of course, but how many potentially magical connections – large and small – do we miss because we’re not open to noticing and receiving them? How often do we not notice, not reach out, not connect simply because we are too busy, too shy, too scared, too distracted to reach out and grab the opportunity?
How much more richness might we claim in this existence if, ever once in a while, we took a day and vowed to live it in awareness. If we decided to boldly claim each and every opportunity that came our way, no matter how seemingly bizarre or random or inconsequential. What sort of things might we learn? What sort of bliss might we encounter? What sort of growth might come our way?
Think about moments like this one from the same blog.
Or this story from Krystyn Heide, who just yesterday found a negative rant left in a coffee shop and used it as inspiration to write and leave random love notes around the city for people to find.
What would you have done if you passed a long haired, bearded stranger in the mall holding a sign offering “FREE HUGS”? What would you have done with the stranger on the bus, or at the gas station or at Trader Joes? What would you have done with that noxious note in the coffee store?
Every second of our existence is created by and carries the potential of our choices. The choice to connect or disconnect. The choice to reach out or close off. The choice to notice and be aware, or the choice to shut down and look away. The choice to not only accept, but to seek out and create new opportunities for connection with the people surrounding us.
Lets just think for a moment about what could happen if we all took a day and made the choice to connect, to notice, to reach out…can you imagine the power in that?
So what do you say? I say lets do it.
“In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.”
Mother Teresa
I’ve been thinking about breath lately, about how my breath is truly the core of my existence. Not just on a physiological level, with oxygenation of blood cells and carbon dioxide exchange, but on a much more spiritual plane.
When you get right down to it, everything comes back to breath. In and out, in and out. To keep myself alive, I breathe. To focus my awareness, I breathe. To calm myself down when my stress goes through the roof, I breathe and breathe and breathe again. It does not get much more basic, or more profound than that.
I wrote a poem last week called ‘breath.life.hope’ that included the following stanzas
“And so I take a breath
and I breathe again
and again and again
filling my lungs and heart and soul
with hope
because my life depends on it
because the center
of life,
mine and yours,
is always breath”
And then yesterday, when visiting my eternal muse Jen Lemen, I came across this passage: “…That no matter what’s happening there is still the magic of my own breath, rising and falling–this one moment where if I breathe into it, I can discover what’s really going down. And truth is always less horrific and more connected than I could have imagined.”
Last week I also got a very last minute opportunity to see an amazing concert. Ingrid Michaelson, Brandi Carlile,Indigo Girls and KT Tunstall. What a line-up of fabulous women. Ingrid was the opening act, and one of the first songs she sang was “Keep Breathing”
“But all that I know is I’m breathing.
All I can do is keep breathing.
All we can do is keep breathing now.”
I’m including a random youtube video, and trust me – it cannot even come close to the experience of hearing her sing this live (talk about tingles all the way to my toes). I was having a rough week, and I must have played this song on repeat about eight hundred bazillion times because it reminded me to do exactly what I needed to do, and nothing more.
Keep breathing.
And so I did, and I got through it. There are days when we have the ability to harness the power of the universe in our bodies and minds and hands. On those days we are made of energy and mental clarity and there is nothing we cannot accomplish. Then there are those days when our breath is all that we have, and indeed, all that we need.
On those days, we need to go back to that breath, and we need to flow with it as best as we possibly can. We need to forget about trying to do more, or be more. We need to relinquish our need to be better or stronger or faster or even saner and we just need to breathe.
When I am aware of my breath, as I am when I listen to this song, I realize that my breath is a channel. It is the conduit for energy, for strength, for serenity, for clarity, for acceptance. It is the center of my life, both given and received. I have a choice in every moment of how deep I want to breathe.
There is a quote I have shared here before, from one of my favorite poets. Mary Oliver’s words move me to the most exquisite and divine places, she is pure magic. This quote, for me a call to action and a reminder to live life fully, is Mary at her most simple and her most brilliant all at once.
“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” ~ Mary Oliver
It’s an easy choice to breathe deep, to find the stillness in the midst of chaos. To take the air, and the energy and the strength and the clarity and the acceptance all the way into the core of my being and to release all the rest back out to the universe. To take in what I need, and to let all that I do not need be carried away and absorbed into the spaces around me instead of letting it dwell inside me.
We are usually so unaware of our breath; it is unconscious, not something requiring attention. As much as the choice to breath deeply is an easy one to make, it is also so incredibly easy to forget to make it.
Breath awareness. It is central to the practice of meditation, but also, I believe, central to the act of living a graceful and mindful life. For me, this awareness of my breath is also an awareness of my life. It brings me back to my center, and allows me to become both weightless and grounded in the very same moment.
So do me a favour today, okay? Slow yourself down and sit in stillness for a few minutes. Play the song above, find one that speaks to you or just absorb the music of your life swirling around you. And then just breathe. Don’t worry about what thoughts come into your head, or if the kids are screaming in the background. Just breathe. Your breath is a gift to the universe. Think for a moment, about how much the world receives just because you make the choice to keep breathing. On your breath you will find gratitude, and peace, and deeper understanding of where you fit into this wild and crazy existence.
“Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don’t want it. What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.”
Oooh, how I love it when words find me, “where the spirit meets the bone”…that gave me chills.
One of my favorite things about the internet is how I’m always just a mouse click away from brilliance, or zen, or wisdom. It’s the possibility that keeps me here long after I know I should shut the computer down. But seriously, read that quote again. Doesn’t that make it all worth it?
This quote speaks to a lesson the universe has been hitting me over the head with repeatedly lately. I just love how, once the cosmos has decided you need to learn something, you keep banging into it over and over again. It chases you down until you one day open your eyes and say “damn…this is what you were driving at? okay, okay, I get it already”…and begin the process of integration and understanding.
It is so easy to be compassionate and understanding to people who treat me well, who do things the way I want them to, who follow the rules I have decided people should live by. But the people that don’t…that’s where I’ve been struggling with the notion of compassionate living.
It’s a tough lesson to learn. To recognize judgmental behaviour as it arises, to own it without personal recrimination, and to set it aside and look with depth and kindness both into and beyond the behaviour or event or person who evoked that response. It requires a constant awareness that I can never, ever ultimately know who a person is at their deepest core. I can’t know their battles, what makes them most weary, what sort of pain they are acting out of. I can try, but I can’t ever really, really know – anymore than someone else can know these things about me.
To find true, authentic compassion, without resorting to condescension or excusing poor treatment that really should be addressed, there’s the real challenge. What does compassion look like? It doesn’t look like pity, that’s for sure. It’s not always cloaked in empathy, for it is unrealistic to assume we can always emphasize. It’s not even always free of expectation or conclusion.
Real compassion involves looking within ourselves - admitting our bias, our tendency to judge, the harshness of our expectations – as much as it does looking into another. It requires being open, even when the person we want to feel compassion for is closed. It is working to transmit kindness, even if the person who needs our compassion is being cruel, or distant, or clueless. It is recognizing that deserving compassion and needing compassion are two very different things, and deciding which one is more important. It is not always easy. There are some times, in the midst of complex human interaction, that compassion is the most difficult emotion to access, let alone cultivate and release.
But cultivate it we must. We have to, because compassion is the root of all peace. How can we hope to find peace on a worldwide scale if we cannot find compassion in our hearts for our friends, and our spouses or lovers, for the stranger who cut us off on the freeway, for the child who just spilled chocolate milk across our computer keyboard? True compassion, rooted in a mantra of encompassing lovingkindness, can change our every interaction by gifting it with the potential for true human connection.
It’s not easy. Some days I struggle much more than others, some people in my life continuously remind me that I have a long way to go, some days I don’t feel like extending compassion to anyone at all.