Mystical Hummingbird

They came to sit in my hands, twice, in one day. Their timing as subtle and brilliant as dolphin. Each time it was after a phone call with people that have presented me with the most refined opportunities to love. People who have offered me lessons on the difference between seduction and love. Martin Prechtel says Love is not about what I want....it is about what Love wants. Seduction is acting in ways to get what I want. In both of these relationships I have deeply longed for what I want. In one for decades. In the other for years. On this day when hummingbird came to land in my hand I made a ceremony to release a particular pattern of fear around staying open in my heart. A week before I had made ceremony to release patterns about what I need and want around one of these relationships.  I participated in a ceremony to let love in. During these calls I felt love and seduction both suggesting how to be present and chose to rest in love, free from the grip of what I want. Hummingbird came to me after each call. I felt love vibrate through me, very high light. I receive it as a healing for my own heart and for those two special humans I adore. There is such spaciousness in the love of a hummingbird....big freedom....and it is a tender gift to shepherd with great care.

The rewards of a deep Sit.

Lilac is a plant kingdom equivalent of Shibuya Crossing. I didn't take photos when I was in Shibuya, I was in awe and having an aha moment. Take a look at these images for an idea. Lilac feels the same way. I am compelled to go out each day and sit. I watch the air traffic above wishing it was possible to capture all the action this plant calls in. This plant is where IT is happening.

It is deeply soothing to simply sit and watch the show. I am learning much nuance about butterfly. How to sit so they come in close. How to move so they don't all scatter and disappear. How to melt myself and be with the entire audio, visual, sensual scene. From the most humble to regal, all come here for what can only be called a love in. All these beings come to make love with lilac. And lilac provides her life sustaining nectar. Euphoria in the garden. My heart makes love with all of this. They make love with me.

Lilac Devotion for Mothers and Others

Lilac Devotion

Oh for the Love of Lilacs

Truthfully? I have spent most of the day finding reasons to be under the lilac blooming in my little secret garden. Oh I was very virtuous and Got Things Done...like pulling the grasses growing in the paths and garden beds. I did some research via reading on how to live more with an open heart. I spoke on the phone with my sister, daughter and dear friend. I wrote and took a few photos. But mostly I sit still in amazement at all of the multitudes who were also visiting the lilacs. I need a field guide to butterflies, there are so many. The queen arrived today, swallowtail...and she stayed a long time and came to the luscious cluster right in front of my face offering me a long gaze upon her magnificence. It is likely grace at work that my camera battery was dead at the time. I let myself follow her path, see her wings illuminated by sunshine, the contrast of her pale yellows with the deep purple panicles a sensational feast.

I'm not sure if I will get a photo of her highness. But I did find the humble other with her broken wing as enchanting. And deeply touching. I wish I could ask her to stop for me and pose while the light came from behind her wings. A soft luminescent tigers eye brown flashed in those moments. The bees, there surely must be a field guide for  bees as well? They are abundant. And maybe the divine herself/himself comes in the form of hummingbird.

This is a magical day. Hummingbird spent a lot of time in the lilac. The longer I sat in stillness, the more comfortable this being became. Again, just in front of my face on the closest blossoms. If you know the particular medicine hummingbird offers then you understand the rare gift of having this creature land in my hands. Just after a phone call with my sister. Hummingbird conjures love as no other medicine. And the lilacs symbolize the first emotions of love. Once is an experience of ecstasy...and today it happened twice. Again, after a phone call with a dear friend. Sitting under the lilacs in the research of what opens the heart...I am graced by the very bird that makes heart opening their business. WOW. May you also receive the joy....

Letting Go

 These last weeks Dandelion has been of deepest fascination. Their resilience, abundance, healing properties, tenacity, tastiness….all of this has captured me….along with their photogenic quality especially when viewed close up.

They also almost never grow alone, they are social. And now that I have encouraged them to grow in the lawn there are legions of them that delight me every spring. Last summer I stopped watering the lawn. In the wilderness where these dandelions grow the lawn has been what I’ve considered the fire safety zone around the house. So the decision to let it go brown felt edgy to me. I cut it close to the ground so truthfully there was very little organic matter to burn. The only things that remained green were chicory, rosemary and dandelion. Those tap roots must be fabulous storage tanks.

This year with the spring rains the dandelions are lush. And I am in love with them. I’ve been feeling in to the metaphor of dandelion these weeks of lent, the period of time in the catholic faith of my childhood between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. The church I attend most often now is the Church of the Holy Wilderness as one brother in law calls it. So Dandelion has been giving me a series of sermons these weeks.

Today I found one dandelion riveting. The photo captures a moment when those seeds that have been growing together, gathered on their single flower journey, have become the seeds themselves about to fly off into the world. They are so spectacular together to my eye.

A woman I dearly love died just a few short days ago. She was to me like one of those dandelion seed parachutes, radiant in her expression of love. She let her seed leave the safe place of attachment to the earth, while the rest of us are as yet still becoming those seeds awaiting our own time to fly.

Dandelion tells me there is a possibility to be as love while I am still here…to open fully, to glow in beauty, to bloom wherever I am, to congregate with others, to offer nourishment, to grow my roots deep, and then let go and fly when the time is right…

Opening and Closing the Heart

It is clear that my expectations, assumptions or judgments about others or life are the teeny (or massive) hair triggers that operate the energetic heart valve. The physical heart keeps on pumping but the flow of heart wisdom, the invisible pulse of love, responds to something else.

I am experiencing the switch mechanism as intention and the inertia to overcome default closing due to my own programming/patterning/habits exists as a choice. I thought at one point that my heart was either/or: open/closed. But the heart is much more fluid than that.

I keep my heart opening. That is my intention and choice.

Why bother? Everything is a stake. My life is a journey towards inevitable death. Any accomplishments, the house, car, clothes, friends, lovers, children....none of them will go with me. I've been seeing how I have leaned into the real and imaginary (ideas) objects of my life to keep me safe, offer me some sense of security, reassurance that life is somehow more 'solid' than it is. And here is the paradox. We live in this solid physical world with jobs, homes and all the rest. Ideas about how to earn a living, who to relate to and how. All worthy pursuits.

But without a choice to move through this world living in love.......??

Sometimes love feels like the highest peak of the tallest mountain I will never be able to acclimate to. And then the invisible switch directs the flow with that wee intention, something shifts around once again I can breathe the rarified air of love flowing through me.

I was talking with a friend this morning about living in love. We both agreed this takes courage. Courage because love cracks open the heart, the inner sight and emotional feelings so that much is felt, understood.

Love likely has more poets, songwriters, spiritual beings and artists of all types dedicating lives to capturing and describing that ineffable state. What I am looking at right now is how often deep love means that boundaries are much clearer...because love of self is at the top of the list with this flow. That might mean having to tell someone else something they do not want to hear and I don't want to have to say. For sure living at high altitude loving comes with many cautions. Much easier, in many ways, to live in the valley. Thankfully we are fluid as humans and can actually make these choices, however easy, hard, necessary or ridiculous they might appear to be. I try to be gentle with myself when I would rather live down in the valley. This is not a matter of right or wrong.

The choice is the research love, of living in loving. A matter of getting curious about what gets in the way of my loving....and a matter of practicing how to work with the flow and keep it coursing in the direction of the open heart even when the inevitable coursing towards closing also comes.

Speaking Your Voice, Singing Your Song

I was driving through San Francisco along Park Presidio to take the Golden Gate bridge to get to Bolinas. Most of the time I travel these streets there are people who catch my attention. I love the freedom the city offers and people accept in expressing who they are and what they believe. I frequently see freedom in fashion or hair, open artistry of life. The intersections are not quiet. I’ve wondered about the tiny old women I see waiting for a bus or the teens on their cell phones seemingly oblivious to traffic. It is all too easy to live without engaging the other humans streaming right alongside of me. Unrelated, disconnected, we travel parallel to one another and yet without openly acknowledging that the unseen pulse of life is moving through us all. At the very least we are sharing the air, the same air that has moved in and out of countless lungs before me and will continue to move through others after coursing through my own tissue.

He was shouting into the traffic though I have no idea what he was saying. I wonder what had so captivated his heart that letting everyone know was paramount. It might seem to be obvious given the objects he holds and wears. But it wasn’t the words I could not hear, it was the passion of his desire to share regardless of how he might appear that affected me. The courage to be so dedicated to his belief that he could surrender attachment to the ‘normal’ boundaries of society and bring his message to the streets for anyone who might pass by. The message I received was to be willing to let my own voice be spoken, offered, to value that I too have some small gift to offer to the chorus of life. We each do.