RAM DASS WAS RIGHT

                                     

This forest where I live was once a temperate rainforest and seems to be returning to that state. Shower after shower of sometimes drippy, sometimes steady rain has been with us for days.  The mountains have disappeared in the distance, and clouds are in the treetops just down the hill.  Green is heavy everywhere. A damp chill in the air is feels nice after the brutal and unusual heat of the past weeks, but I find myself wishing for some Carolina blue and a sunshine relief from wetness and fog. What is here though is moisture that fills the water table and my pond, causes weak trees to fall and mud in the barn..mixed blessings.

While I have loved my adventures and my curiosity, I am finally bone weary of discontent, of wanting to be somewhere else, someone else, in some other time doing some new thing. In my seventieth year now, it seems a good idea, even an opportunity, to plant my contentment right where I am.  In adulthood, I have lived in six states, eleven houses, had a couple of husbands and untold numbers of dreams, notions and impulses, some followed to fruition and many more discarded. I have tried numerous paths to God, only to learn that just stopping where I am is where IT is.  

As I talk with friends I find that many of us have had this experience of lifelong chasing the next shiny thing into the daydream and losing much of our lives in the process.  I have stayed in this beloved place that I am married to for many years now, but the restlessness still aggravates. The seductive fantasy of a new love beckons.. a smaller more manageable property, a new medium for working with color, a new poetic form and on and on.  It has been fun but now seems fragmented and exhausting.

In some things I have been faithful and gone deep. Those times have been the source of real joy and learning.. loving what I have and knowing the fullness of enough.. looking around and really experiencing the grace that is my life.  In the years I have left, I want to cultivate the ability to surrender, to settle in, to look closely and clearly at what is in front of me now even the changes, even the losses.  I want to experience the essence that is only found in the stillness of here...

the rain, the drippy green, a sleepy dog and the fog..

DRINKING POISON

I often refer to watching the news by the title of this post.  I am torn between my addiction to knowing what is going on and my certain knowledge that the blah blah blah of the talking egos is not only bad for me but really awful for our country.  We are told to be very afraid, to detest folks who disagree with us and that we are really stupid people who have no capacity to understand complex issues.  I do think that watching and reading only one side of things is intellectually lazy and try to take in intelligent views of the other side of the political fence.  I need to remember that the operative word here is "intelligent" and that the reality show for ratings, whatever the political shade, no longer has no ethical boundaries and information gained there is always suspect. I really care that this wonderful land that I have lived and thrived in for almost seventy years is a good place for generations to come.  Sometimes the insistence on short term gratification seems overwhelming, and I just want to give up and let those who will live in it deal with it.  I have beloved friends and family members who seriously disagree on the way to accomplish a good future and I hope to continue to love and listen and learn so that I do not become a crabbed old crone who thinks she knows everything.   Also..will turn off the tv more often I hope.

THE NEW YEAR AND JOURNAL KEEPING

I like to begin with a fresh journal for the new year but this morning I realized that I have many blank pages left in the book I have been using.  I had made a journal in the fall that I love, a quiet rose brown cover, pale rose pages and decorative painted paper that suggests a rose garden.  I put it out for sale praying that no one would buy it so that I could use it for my winter mornings. It is still in my studio. this morning before dawn the path down the hill was dark and temps in the twenties so I decided to write a bit in the "old" journal begun in the fall.  I ended up writing my new year intentions in it and realized that I needed to just continue until I filled the pages and promised myself the rose journal in the spring. On the way to the barn I stopped and looked at the fresh book.  I turned to the back inside cover where I place the name of each book and saw that the title I had given it was "Quiet Waiting Journal." I knew immediately that the book was intended for my daughter not for me.  She is going through a time that will require much patience and she loves pink and roses.  Whatever she uses it for, the intention of "quiet waiting" is for her.

Many years ago a wise woman, Jan Lowry, suggested that I keep my journals as "letters to God".  I have done that, beginning early on "Dear God" and moving on through parental names to a more intimate and comfortable salutation these days.  I have poured my inner world onto the pages, pleading, raging, thanking and laughing mostly at my ridiculous dramas and self-told tales.  I have worked through divorces, brain tumors and IRS audits, upheavals and joyful moves.  I have worked out plans and poems on those pages. Because they are letters, I am surrendering my life's gifts and detritus over and over to a greater power and presence than my little theatrical ego.  I am so grateful for this "divine therapy" that joins my other practices of Centering Prayer and the Twelve Steps.

Not everyone writes or wants to.  I do not have a rule about writing every day and sometimes things are so painful that they have to be written about in retrospect.  I will send the rose journal to my daughter for her "quiet waiting" period and she can do with it what feels right, even if it is only to have it around.  What is clear however, is that my plans and notions of what will be right and my need for "freshness" in the new year have nothing to do with what needs to happen and I am most blessed when I am open and move at the pace of guidance.  When I can do that I learn.

Silence

Coming up from the barn this morning I paused on the studio porch to look out at the intense green of my neighbor's pasture and the shapes of budding trees in the cold spring fog. In that pause I encountered the silence underlying all the sense impressions of chill and woodsmoke and greening spring. I love sitting in meditation because it allows me to rest in that fertile stillness but am aware that it is available always and that my life is a dance that is constantly emerging from it, sometimes difficult and sometimes graceful. It is my source and the source of all that is. I trip over words for it...God, The Great Mystery, The Divine. I treasure its ineffable quality. It is available so easily to children who do not have the annoying boundaries of reason and fact and intellect.  I can remember being a weird kid sitting in the tops of trees and lying under bushes on sweet warm days just being. I was a dreamy careless child, often late, losing and tripping over things. I still love to just wander and let my mind go. I forget to return calls, check email, buy eggs. I have a routine with the animals and fortunately do not forget them. I love just hanging out in my life so I guess I am emerging today as a dreamy, careless old woman but what a lovely gift those few minutes of unplanned meditation in the spring mist this morning.

Stopping By Woods

with a bow to Robert Frost..This morning silent snow falling as I walked up the hill from the barn. I stopped and looked out on the grayscale landscape, white hills punctuated by the various dark and darker shapes of buildings, trees and stone walls.  Something is so deeply beautiful in the lack of color. We live in a world of stunning visual stimulation. From bright clothes to HDTV, our eyes and brains are occupied constantly in a riot of red and yellow and green.  I love color. I love playing with it, living in it and the celebration of the senses that it provokes, but something in my soul is soothed and healed by the quiet monochromatic world that a snowy morning creates. I love music and the sound of voices, but the falling snow on a path in the woods is a prayer call to silence. Here in the mountains each season offers its messages. Spring brings the rising of energy, summer the steady lush growing, autumn the brilliant dance of gratitude.  Winter tells me to go inward and abide in what I experience as "the silence under silence" the ineffable ever present pure love that is experienced when my mind is at rest. When I stand on the snowy path I am reminded.

Soul Needs and Consequences

This morning I was looking at pictures on Facebook of a group of dearest old friends at a Christmas gathering and feeling love accompanied by a bleak sadness that I am not with them. I have always told my children that our lives are the result of our choices and I do believe that but, here alone on this mountain with ten inches of snow and many animals to feed, it is easy to feel pangs of loneliness and self pity. There is always a certain amount of fear before I start down the hill on ice cleats or, as today, snowshoes. I ask myself what a sixty eight year old woman is doing living alone in this life that can be cold and hard and even dangerous. The answer always is the beauty of this place and the mountain light. I cannot seem to live without those two things neither of which I can touch or capture but are necessities for the life of my soul.

I often wonder how we are each made with such different soul-needs. I have friends who thrive on contact and constant interaction with others, have good marriages to dear deep friends, give service to those who need what they can do.  They live in cities and neighborhoods and thrive on the closeness with friends and neighbors. I have done some of that happily in the past but am absolutely unable to make that choice today. There is some grief, however with the loss of that laughing and touching and loving that comes in daily contact with old friends and family who know my history and can be completely trusted with my unadorned self. I do have wonderful companions here in the mountains, most of whom moved here with the same passion and need for natural beauty and a preponderance of solitude.  I treasure them as well. We support each other through through the tough weather, whether it be physical or emotional. My choices have always had losses and blessings. I cling to the promise that my 12 step program gives me that I "will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it." I do know that I only truly have today and what I choose to cultivate in it. That will always color what adventures in love and life I have in the future. So sending love to my dear ones from all parts of my life, I will put on the longjohns and snowshoes and go off to continue living my (cold) mountain day.