This morning I woke to a clear blue sky beaming down through the dome of my yurt. I woke to soft sheets and tired eyes, and tenderness in my heart for this life. I climbed down from my loft and put the kettle on. Let the cat outside and stretched my limbs. The trees surrounding this little green jewel of a meadow where my home sits seem to be stretching their limbs as well, reaching upward for the morning light just beginning to beam out across the land. We, together, carbon-based life forms, longing for that first kiss of warmth.
I sat at the table with my coffee and my journal, reading over the poems that came yesterday. One of them a love song to life, the other, a love song to one of my heart's dearest friends. Treasuring these words that come from who knows where and travel through my mind, my body being, my fingertips, and the tip of a pen. Writing is, in its purest form, simply allowing my body to be an emissary of spirit. When I write from a place of truth, I am hardly even there. Words flow through me but not from me. Reminiscent of the beautiful passage from Kahil Gibran’s the prophet, When the prophet speaks of children.
“ They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
This miracle of creation, of being a creator, being on the receiving end of life force flowing through my body fills me with an unspeakable reverence and joy. Writing, as any of you who also put your pen to paper or your fingers to the keyboard keys know, isn't always easy. It does take work. We have to show up for our craft. When I do show up and show up completely empty of any idea of what I want the outcome to be, a force greater than myself graces me with presence, and the magic of creation. We meet halfway. I arriving with my pen in my hand and my heart open, and spirit moving towards me with equal force and reciprocity to that which I offer.
I scribbled a bit in my journal, capturing some moments from yesterday that I wanted to hold. The beauty of sitting by the Molalla river and shucking beans with my dear friend Shelly, the way her eyes looked in that bright afternoon sun, bluer than the sky, the way my heart felt so open and connected as if there was no barrier between me and anything else. How I am learning to inhabit all that I am and bring it forward fully to life. Holding nothing back.
I don't write in my journal with the intent of creating a map of my days, certainly don't write in the -dear diary this is what happened today format. No, if anything I write in my journal as a love song. As a grief song. As a honoring of the wild, swirling, intoxicating, and devastating experience of being a human being in this world. I write to honor life. My life. The only one I know, the only one I am truly responsible for.
Writing is a sacred act. A morning ritual of offering. A way of feeding the glowing thread, the spider silk that shimmers and connects me to the divine. When I sit to write I am saying to the holy, I am here. I am grateful for all that has been given. I will not waste it.
And here I am now, once again writing, in an effort to share that which is deep within me - with you. If there is one thing that I could share with those of you longing for a life that is more soul filled and purpose driven it would be this. Establish a morning ritual to connect to spirit. There is no right or wrong way to do this. It's not about what it looks like, it's the doing of the thing, And the doing of it with absolute fidelity.
A wise mentor of mine, one who it would not be too grandiose to say helped me save my own life, gave me this little nugget of wisdom that has always stayed with me. “Give time to God every morning, it could be one minute or one hour, but give it every day, and never stop giving.”
What are you giving to God today?
How are you reaching out towards spirit?
Bridging the gap, weaving the sacred thread of reciprocity that binds us together. Human and divine. Earth and spirit. Longing made flesh.
This is how we become truly human. Place ourselves in relationship with life and honor the duty of being, each of us in our own small ways, the emissary of spirit in this world.
