I feel like I am on a raft at sea, dying of thirst with water all around me. Which is to say on a conscious level I am aware of a number of impulses and ideas begging for me to pick up my pen, brush, camera or journal and act and yet ...
... and yet.
I am recognizing my desire to take on new projects, explore new medium is a form of aversion. Yes, part of me is having fun playing and experimenting but part of me is also hiding. To keep skimming the surface of things (what someone once labeled "scanning") is to avoid going in deeper where things may be murky, dark and scary. But to not visit those places means limiting myself to always living on the surface and also reacting out of fear.
I am listening to Tara Brach read her book Radical Acceptance where she talks about compulsive doing or work as one of the addictions we seek as a means to avoid intimacy with our inner life. She read this passage by Thomas Merton: "To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence."
I'm not even sure what it is I am pulling away from or what I think I might find. I just know I need to heed the impulse to draw within. For what I thirst for will not be found "out there"; what I seek - what we all seek - can only be found within. I know it has to do with acceptance, embracing the whole of me with total love and compassion. Ironically, the first poem I nervously submitted to Maya for her feral writing course addressed this issue:
I am tidy by nature -
stuffed animals were organized
according to
order, family, genus
never a mingling of tigers with dogs,
the monkeys kept away
from cats.
Or is it my training?
librarian
historian
life stored in plastic tubs
photo albums
dates, notes, names penned onto tabs.
How is it then
I seem to have misplaced my dreams?
As if all the busy work
was a means of avoiding the void.
Was I careless in my packing?
Or careless with myself?
Tidying my life to
tidy an unruly heart.
Like my petunia plant, I need to do some serious deadheading.I know I need to tend to my heart right now ... there are messages and truths waiting for my attention and too much busyness is preventing me from having the space and time to listen. Listen with openness, love and acceptance which cannot be rushed or crushed into a tight time table. I know I will still be creating as a means of exploring these whisperings, but I am returning to the theme of last summer which was Say Less, Create More. Or maybe Say Less, Trust More?
second baby tooth lost over the weekendI think if we have a tooth fairy to reward these transitions, then we need a soul fairy to reward our transitions on this journey to wholeness. What should she leave under the pillow?
