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.

Glibness

"fluent and voluble but insincere and shallow"

This is not what life in the wilds encourages. It is nearly impossible to live in a teeny village and maintain the glibness which is an all too common attribute of city life.

I had the serendipity of meeting a community member at the Post Office, a place where everyone collects their mail. He was in the midst of a meltdown. You know those 'invisible' people who sleep in the doorways in the city? Here in the teeny village we know their name. When they have a crisis because they don't have all the gifts, talents and abilities many of us do, they have a melt down right where they are, in front of the Post Office as it happened today.

This dear man was anything but glib. He was as vulnerable and sincere and clear sighted about his life as anyone I have ever known when he told me he was beyond help. That putting a gun into his mouth would be a way of finding solution.

I asked him to please not do that....my cousin did this two months ago and every nerve cell in my body was vibrating as he spoke those words.

I realize that in the context of a city life this type of encounter would usually be met with either something like avoidance or at best a phone call to 'the authorities'. Here in the wilderness this man is my neighbor, someone I know by name. I am, my neighbors are, the 'authorities'.

His distress activated in me a call to action. I was able to help him in some teeny ways and I let others of kind heart know the level of vulnerability he shared and they are also taking steps

When Barbed Wire is deeply embedded a tree will eventually die...

 to make sure he eats.

I have recently in my life been in active meditation on gratitude....I am so very grateful that I am not beyond help as this man sees (possible quite clearly) himself. That I can take baby steps in the direction of my dreams, that I even have dreams which have a chance of being real, that I have a place to eat, food to eat, the ability to navigate a bit of the complexity of every day life in America without having a public meltdown.

Please send your best thoughts and prayers for this dear hearted man...who shall remain nameless...send every best thought you might imagine you would need if you could not function and you were loved....love him....please.....love him NOW....

The Power of Ceremony

I am a big fan of using small fire ceremony for the release and surrender of old and the invitation of intentions for new. Many would call this prayer. That works.

Right now I appreciate the ceremony of laying the sticks, making visual offerings, taking time to write out what I am releasing....speaking it out loud before I strike the match.

I've been experiencing these tiny ceremonies as the invisible spearhead moving before me, creating room for me to move and live in life in a new way. The heat of the fire is magic alchemy, accelerating the process of change. I built the small offering in the photo on a tiny river beach near my home. I've been working with identifying and then letting go of the parts of my relationship to the father of my children which no longer serve anything good. Why? So I can live life as freely and creatively as possible, in love and compassion.

For the People in my Life

I spoke in a group of women a few months ago about having met the love of my life. They clapped and cheered. "I'd like to introduce her to you. Myself," I announced. Making this declaration out loud has had some quite astonishing consequences.

I hold you sweet women (and you dear ones in other circles) forever in my house of gratitude for creating a beautiful place to be able to speak that truth, hope, prayer, intention of forever self love out loud. I am grateful that in having received me you also hold some teeny invisible threads that help to hold together the container for that self love to grow, even if you have long forgotten what I said.

We are both the nectar and the harvesters of nectar.

Many things have begun to grow in my life that I had not thought possible. I do love the analogy of our lives as soil. My life soil had been cultivated until it was quite nearly depleted in vital nutrients and I nearly died. We all have these stories. Some of what led to my depletion...the death of my dear mother who was my best friend, my beloved children leaving the nest, a divorce that ended with my spouse hating me even though he initiated the divorce, a rebound engagement where a long time friend swept me off my feet and then tossed me away. Incorrect sourcing of my creative passion.

I think I understand that I had to have three long years of being inert, as much as that time was utterly disorienting. Depleted soil takes a long time to regenerate. It takes conscious intention to investigate how depletion occurred and to rebuild soil once it has come to that point. Until the soil is replenished nothing can grow.

Today I am grateful to be alive. I am grateful in this spring that creative expression, which I had thought lost to me forever, is beginning to grow once again. Somewhere deep in the root system of my being it never died. I am cautiously optimistic and deeply reverent for the return of this gift.

There is much I could say about the inert time. I will likely refer to it over and over again in many ways in these blogs in sincere attempts to encourage others. But the bottom line was that I had to go through the dark times to discover who was always there with me and learn to love her and trust her and cherish her deeply. She is the one who will never leave me. The love of my life. Love.

It does not matter to me if you like to say She, or for that matter He and call the one (or One) who is with me someone other than myself. What I learned in the dark is that there is room for so much....and that where I fundamentally source everything in my life from....this is an ongoing Research Project about love....

To the lovely ladies of the circle, of my life....blowing you kisses borne on the breeze of violet perfumed love...for your beauty, vulnerability, the courage you offer by showing up for yourself and for all of us...

To the lovely men in my circles, in my life... nourishing love for your deep tender hearts and all it takes to be a male bodied person in these times....love coming to you through the beeswax scented fir blossoms intoxicating you with desire for opening even more...