I’m endeavoring, and am successful more and more often, to remember to pause, to settle, to be grateful, before moving into the plans and tasks, upon waking…
“In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
that closes
the moment
you begin your plans.
What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.
What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To become human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.
You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.
Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be
what urgency
calls you to your
one love?
What shape waits
in the seed of you
to grow and spread
its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?”
Spring continues to unfold, with the absorbing music of life bubbling just beneath the surface. I feel it.
Parker J. Palmer’s words resonated deeply with me this morning as he wrote the following words as a prelude to Mary Oliver’s poem – both his words and Mary’s poem follow. They speak to me of of season of rebirth in northwest Montana and of Love.
“Spring arrived on my patch of the planet last week, but it’s 25° here as I write! To encourage the season to show up more fully, here’s Mary Oliver with her spot-on description of “the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring.”
I’m especially grateful for the profound reminder in the pivotal line of this poem: “There is only one question: how to love this world.”
Oliver illustrates love for the world not with a Valentine sentiment, but with a black bear “just risen from sleep” coming down the mountain with “her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.”
Wild animals “love the world” because they depend on it for their well-being. We are dependent, too, no matter how arrogantly we pretend that we are self-sufficient.
There’s only one way for us to survive and thrive. We must learn to love the earth and each other with the ferocity of a mother bear—saying “NO!” to everything that threatens that which we love, and “YES!” to all that gives it life…”
-Parker J. Palmer
“Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring
down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of eary spring
I think of her, her four black fists flickering the gravel, her tongue
like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question:
how to love this world. I think of her rising like black and leafy lodge
to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else
my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting,
all day I think of her — her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.”
Your vibration has been simmering, now ready to burst forth! I feel this awakening in every cell, the sweetness on my skin, a soft embrace, an invitation.
The inner world of winter making way for the outer connections of Spring into Summer. So many Gifts! I am present.
“Only with winter-patience can we bring the deep-desired, long-awaited spring”
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“The life of the earth comes up with a rush in springtime.”
-Laura Ingalls Wilder
“To me a lush carpet of pine needles on spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.”
-Helen Keller
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
“The beauty of the trees,
the softness of the air,
the fragrance of the grass,
speaks to me.
The summit of the mountain,
the thunder of the sky,
the rhythm of the sea,
speaks to me.
The faintness of the stars,
the freshness of the morning,
the dew drop on the flower,
speaks to me.
The strength of fire,
the taste of salmon,
the trail of the sun,
And the life that never goes away,
They speak to me.
And my heart soars”
-Chief Dan George
All of these moments that Chief George eloquently lists make my heart soar too! And my unbounded soaring heart is activated by all that surrounds me here – at home. Simple and sweet gifts of nature and love, and the “beauty of the trees and the softness of the air” touch me to my molecules.
May you feel your heart soar as precious moments compel your complete attention and are indelibly etched on mind and memory…
A lifelong journey that we all undertake – the journey of self love. Brianna Wiest has encapsulated the process with these beautiful words…
“Have we all been online for long enough — and accosted with self-help promotional trailers for as many years — to get the memo that “loving yourself” is important stuff? It’s the genesis of a life-well-lived: the moment you realize that nobody else is responsible for your happiness but you.
Here’s the thing: you love in other people what you love in yourself; you hate in other people what you can’t see in yourself. Our little worlds are constructed by images of ourselves. We are the base point and the sounding board and the backdrop against which we experience everything else. Sounds like some more hoity toity existentialist crap, but the moment you understand this is the moment magic starts to happen.
When you “love yourself” — which doesn’t mean to necessarily hold yourself in the highest regard, but to see yourself fully and honestly, to take care of yourself, to heal your past, to address your present, to take action where it need be taken — you’re able to love others. You’re able to identify what you want and then focus on how to get it. You release yourself from the battles you were never going to win: the ones where you’re seeking someone else to make you feel happy, waiting for a promotion to make you feel worthy (you know how this game goes).
Here are 8 ways to love yourself, even if you don’t fully understand what it means:
1. Value Your Truth Over Someone Else’s Discomfort
This shouldn’t be confused with “denying or ignoring someone else’s discomfort” in favor of your oblivion, but rather knowing that nobody is going to speak up for you. You must communicate how you are feeling, what you are thinking and what you want, if you ever want to see it considered. You can’t remain mum and expect people to psychically understand or act on that assumed understanding. You must be your own lobbyist, advocate, counselor and protector. You must value yourself enough to become those things, too.
2. Stop Making Your Opinion The Median Of Everybody Else’s
You become the average of what you’re surrounded by the most: your group of friends, the people who raised you, the media you consume. Your opinions, and therefore, beliefs, thoughts and ideas — you know, the things that ultimately shape your life — do too. Most people reach to do what’s seen as universally acceptable within their circle. When you feel resistance or discomfort because who and what you are isn’t aligned with that, follow it. It is a message. Love yourself enough to listen.
3. Realize That Being Whole Is Not Being Perfect, It’s Just Being Aware Of Every Part Of You
People like to go on and on about how finding love isn’t about seeking someone to fill a gap within you, but to coexist with your whole — and while that’s beautiful and true and elusively sought, there’s something a bit truer that is rarely communicated, and it is that your “whole self” doesn’t necessarily have to be your “healed self.” It’s just you being in full awareness of who you are, how you are, what you respond to and in what ways. That’s being whole. The rest of your life will be spent shifting these aspects, but the beginning is simply knowing.
4. Treat Yourself The Way You Would Someone You Love
Take care of yourself the way you would someone you love, too. Make sure you get enough sleep and exist in nice, clean surroundings and eat food that’s good and good for you. If you have a thought that’s not critiquing and self-improving but rather just negative for the sake of degrading yourself, imagine saying that thing about someone you love; you wouldn’t. Don’t hold yourself to a different standard.
5. Realize That Nobody Is Going To Save You
No love, no God, no amount of money is going to save you from yourself. You are the only person who has control over your life. This is not just the most liberating thing you’ll do, it’s essentially the one liberation you must choose for yourself. Because there are a million ways you’re assigning control to other people, completely unknowingly. People wait lifetimes for other things to save them — for love to make them feel. For some religious deity to outstretch a hand and save them from suffering. For their sense of purpose to hinge on the promise of a tomorrow, an afterlife, who knows. The point is: your life will change the day you change it, not the day you’ve changed yourself enough so to convince someone else to do it for you.
6. Listen To What You Are Trying To Tell You
When you’re in pain, you’re communicating with yourself. Discomfort and upset and “bad vibe-ness” doesn’t arise so we can just ignore it until it’s better — it’s the very powerful way we tell ourselves: there is a better way. There is another option that I am not yet choosing. Think of it this way: you wouldn’t feel discomfort if you didn’t know something better to already be true.
7. Figure Out What Could Make Your Life Better — And Then Do It
Once you know the truth, act on it. The interim between knowing and doing is the space where suffering thrives. If you can identify a friend being a consistent and actively negative force in your life, break the hell up with them. Start looking for new jobs. Start eating better. Start sleeping more. Start opening your heart and accepting invitations and creating some of your own. If you want your life to be different, make it that way.
8. Figure Out What Would Make You Truly Proud Of Yourself — And Then Do It
These are the building blocks of genuine confidence: decide what would make you — not your ego — feel like an unstoppable raging badass, and then do that thing. Then find another “thing” and do it again. And again. And again. These moments may be small, but your feat will feel enormous. You’ll have created a life in which you are the heroine of your own story, not the victim or reluctant, disengaged protagonist. So few people live within the roles they feel the world has assigned to them, without ever realizing that they were writing the book all along.”
“Let us love winter
