A Wise Friend

A wise friend is akin to a book of old wisdom.  A book of bone and soul and skin. A book that breathes and speaks and eats. A book with a song on a wet tongue. A book that walks with you up the hills, through the garden paths, across the grass, into the city, and to the top of the rugged country. A book that sits at the table, weaving with you tapestries of word histories. A book that gives and receives empathy, honesty, and energy. A book of authenticity.

We all need this attuned connecting, this co-creating that comes from existing within the exchange of such delicate witnessing. 

Yes, this love-giving living is vulnerable. It is a little scary. What if there is disagreement or accidental offense? What if there is embarrassment? Fear does this, doesn't it? It wants us all to stay home alone, hiding. There is vulnerability when one loves wholeheartedly. There is vulnerability when one lives with such bravery. 

I am on this enormous vibrant earth, in bone and soul and skin, to experience expansion. To go out and do and be. Yes, there is and will be suffering. And yes, perhaps too, a journey of beloved belonging, and perhaps too, an awakening! 

A wise friend is akin to a book of old wisdom. A book of beauty, spine, and being. A book of bounty! I want the shelves of my life to hold such generosity, to hold such love! For love is the center of us all, the center of it all, the engine of everything. 

I remember twenty. Do you?

I remember the pull of love. The almost obsession. The need of my wanting. The fear I had of anyone leaving. And all that spontaneous weeping! I feared time. I knew it could unravel unfavorably. We were young. This could end. But then it didn't. We followed and wondered and worried and wandered. Night after night, we slept beneath the same blanket. We once had a dog. We miss her still. We had many jobs. We had a baby and then four years later, we had another. And now there are children in a bedroom I once painted green, sleeping. Except when they are awake and playing, screaming, singing, running, or climbing like monkeys across our torn and worn furniture.  Now, I am forty and we live in a boat of a house on the edge of a hilly wooden bay and I can't help but think about our beginning. And about this boisterous moment. I remember twenty. Do you? Do you miss it? The simplicity of it? It wasn't simple. But it seems that way now. Are you wondering about my young pull of love? It's here. I am that beautiful child still. The one pulled by love. The one laughing and eating and running and dreaming. The one timid but climbing, like a monkey, from the box made for good little girls. I am still quite quiet and reserved, but I am returning to myself. I am rediscovering my deep wildflower soul, and let me tell you, it is bold. 

Still and Steady

Is it possible to remain present when attacked? 

To keep one's energy contained and protected? To shield oneself and hold all counterattacks back? To allow rage and grief to tear through oneself? To observe the pain and live momentarily in that suffering and then move and move until it is out of the mind and out of the limbs? To allow others to be stuck in a state of egoic patterns (while observing one's own desire to arm with word weapons, to spit lists of the other's culpabilities) but then say little or nothing? To allow others to be stuck in a state of egoic patterns (while observing one's own desire to flee, to hide behind window curtains and bedcovers) but then be out in the world and free? To allow others to be stuck in a state of egoic patterns, (while observing one's own desire to fix, to weep anxious apologies) but then allow silence to speak? 

Is it possible? I believe it is. 

And I will allow this hope to root, burst, and bloom within me.  

For this is the way toward peace. 

I am alive!

I run with the children as if I were one of them only bigger and stronger. I trick them with twists and turns and they laugh as they lunge and miss me. Eventually, they are holding me around my middle as we all fall down in a happy heap. Red cheeks / cold grass. I am a winter mother. And I love to be strong and full of exuberance. I love to run and rumble. To play! Oh, this magnificent mammalian play!  The limbs move. The blood moves. The breath moves. The energy of it all, dancing from the dirt earth through the body and up to the gray wool sky. I am alive! I am alive.