Halfway between broken and perfect

This is where I keep finding Life.

Where the magical and the cruel somehow make suitable dance partners. As they move and sway and step, tendrils of love and loss swirl in the air, then weave into the fabric of Existence.

Beauty and chaos, hand in hand, gather the fabric and form it into the garments that Life wears as she moves through time.

And when she returns to this place, clothes thread bare, destruction and conception undress her and prepare her for another journey.

Much, much happens here, halfway between broken and perfect.

The movement of beauty

What is the ordinary yet sacred in your world? What in life stirs reverence and respect within you. What do you hold as precious, but not fragile? What is inviolable?

Take stock of these things. Bring them forward to your own attention. They are the anchors of your life. They are the reminder that the sacredness comes from within you and is freely given. Now you can see that you are always the center in the movement of beauty.

The currents of Life

Life swirls and churns, like the winds. Sometimes bringing delightful, refreshing kisses to your face. Other times driving the snows and the rains straight into your bones.

That you aren’t feeling a soothing breeze at this moment, is no indication that the winds have permanently ceased. That you are caught in a tornado now, is no signal that peace will never be again.

If you feel Life’s winds too little or too much, it’s worth a pause and a ponder - where are you pulling your feeling of being alive from? Where have you placed yourself in relation to the air?

Are you looking in places where the winds currently do not blow? It may be time to pull yourself from a dormant graveside in search of new drafts.

Have you set up camp in a hurricane’s path? If evacuation is not possible, wait for the winds to change, as they always do.

Be stirred or be still, the currents will be with you either way.

Find the faucet

It’s the wrong amounts of life at the wrong times that gets us.

Sometimes we get too much at once. Taking life in feels like trying to drink from a fire hose, with force and pressure pummeling us, threatening to drown us where we stand.

Other times it feels like there’s not enough. Slow drips of life seem to taunt our parched hearts as we wander the Earth with a deep thirst.

What we all need is to find the faucet. To become water diviners when the land seems bare and dry, and learn how to ease the flow when the waters threaten to flood.

From our own trial and error, and following maps drawn by others, I’m sure we can find it, and drink deep just the right amount.

The grief agreement

I don’t go looking for grief, but I’ve loved and lost too many times for it not to know my soul’s permanent address.

Sometimes I can feel it coming. I tingle when I know when it’s in my neighborhood, when it’s turned the corner onto my street. I’m ready for it before it announces itself by knocking on my door.

Other times it launches a sneak attack, and I don’t know it’s arrived until it kicks the door in.

But once it’s at my home, we have an agreement. I am to dissolve myself and pour myself into its cracks, to live and breathe as grief for as long as it decides to stay.

Why? Because somewhere along the way I was given one order.

Be Lived.

And I said, “Yes. Yes, I will.”

And nothing holds me more to my word than grief.

I know joy and delight and wonder and awe and I am so grateful that I know how to dance to their tunes.

But it’s grief, with its voice like crashing glass, that reminds me most - this is living.

Here. Now. This is alive and you are life.

So I keep to our agreement because once grief is gone and I’ve reformed myself, I always notice how much clearer I hear the music.

(For a spoken word version of this piece, visit my Instagram)

The beautiful questions

Poet David Whyte introduced me to the idea of a beautiful question. When I heard him say it, it was a moment of recognition. I hadn’t realized it before then, but I love beautiful questions – the type that aren’t meant to help you analyze, but rather, to put your mind and heart in a new place.

The right question at the right time is a vehicle. It transports you into the realm of contemplation. You end up in territory that you otherwise would not have traveled to unless the question was asked.

I’ve been offering samples of these questions on Instagram.

If you’d like to experience these “mini sessions”, they’re less than two minutes and linked below.

​Two minutes for worthiness​

​Two minutes for clarity

​Two minutes to say what needs to be said

To touch the thin places

In Irish Celtic lore, they talk about the “thin places”. Places where the veil between worlds is translucent. Where heaven and earth come close enough to touch.

To me, the thin places are where the known and the unknown meet, where the threads of their fabric make contact and begin to weave a new pattern, allowing you to see and feel the magic of their meeting place.

Language is one way to touch the mystery of the thin places and bring pieces back into the world of the practical, pragmatic and ordinary.

Through words, you wield a tangible amount of real, true magic. You can dip yourself into thin places and, in pockets made of sentences and phrases, carry back at least a small amount of the same creative force that creates Life itself.

Do you know you have this power?

To touch the thin places and bring magic into your world?

Take a moment to contemplate what those thin places are to you, and play with the words to describe it. Let yourself touch the magic.

Spend your life and become rich

I cannot give you a quarter
without both heads and tails.
But regardless of what side is up
when I put the money in your hand,
the value is always the same.

And just like so,
you cannot get a life without both joy and pain.
Regardless of what side is currently up,
I hope you know you hold currency.
From this, you can buy the great treasures
that are only found in the depths of experience.

Spend your life and become rich.

There has been a promise

I see the spark of Life diminishing behind so many eyes, hearts receding back in defensive retreat. I know how deeply we can hurt, believing that Life and potential are shrinking.

If you must pull back, do not go far. There has been a promise made to you that should not go unclaimed. It is the promise of your full self. But you cannot receive it while held back in the shadows for safety. In the light, there are things for you to see...

Rage is affirmation of Life.

Destruction is affirmation of Life.

Despair is affirmation of Life.

In the same way as is

Joy,

Delight,

Love.

There is no place that Life is not. And because of the Life that courses through you, you can take in more of yourself from anything in existence. You can take in grief and have it add to you, not detract. You can take in sadness and expand, not diminish. You can take in take confusion and find yourself, not lose.

This is what Life asks of you, to take in all its glories and its horrors, its poetry and absurdity, and let it fill you up with the holy knowing of “I am.”

My love, you are.

With,

Of,

For,

Life.

So cry your tears and laugh your joys and scream your anger. Empty yourself over and over again at Life’s feet as you fan the flames of aliveness within yourself. Then square your shoulders and raise your head as you proudly move with the grace of the gods toward your birthright.

The weight of being alive

How do you hold the weight of being alive? And yes, there is a weight.

It’s the result of relationships and forces between what is us, and what is not us.

Just as we feel gravity pull our body toward the center of the Earth, we feel Life pull our psyche toward the center of existence.

The force of gravity, the force of life – they cause weight.

If the Earth were smaller, if Life were weaker, you’d be lighter, you know. You would take long, floaty steps through your story, like an astronaut on the moon.

But do you want a weaker Life? A smaller existence?

Can I offer you comfort in the fact that the heavy tether proves that you belong to something so much greater than yourself? And it belongs to you.

Would you hold the weight differently if you knew it proved that the mass of all existence wants to echo in your being?

Surely you have cried out to existence in exhilaration, in rage, in passion, in frustration, “I. Am. Here.” And you have tripped over the words when Life unexpectedly acknowledged you with its reply, “I. Am. Here.”

When the echoes grow, it blurs the line between what is us, and what is not us, changing the relationships and the forces. You might wonder, if you’re holding the weight of being alive…

…what aliveness is holding you?