My mother gave up on teaching me knitting because I kept losing stitches.  That should have been a sign.  Sure I was only seven or eight at the time.  But I should have known.  Instead, what did I do?  I ran down the street to play.   Now it’s time to weave all the dropped stitches back in.  There’s a few strands as it turns out so it’s not going to be a quick job either.  But it feels good to wake up to these tasks, knowing some of what I must do. 

 Naturally I can’t speak for everyone, but in general, if something is snagging your spirit and dragging you down, whether it’s a schedule or a program, a person or an element, I think it’s time to take out the cosmos kit and get cracking.  For the most part our bodies respond and produce the biochemicals that we need to function properly.  But when we get run down our rejuvenating ability gets shut down.   We might need a shot of B12 or a certain form of coaxing and motivation to get things rolling again.  Who knows, our push towards a new horizon could simply come from a shift in the winds.  The winds could come along like our spirit returning and nudge us forward.  And then we’ll wonder, is it a weather system or our spirit which hovers around wondering when will we get going?  Sometimes it seems that change comes easily once you realize that whatever was streaming before is now damned and diverted.  It’s time to break through the walls and let the water come rushing.

The sound of the refrigerator or the heating system when the wind isn’t speaking. The ice already melting and winter just settling in. The light like thinly settling dust coming through the opaque grey sky.  Clouds would make a difference. 

It’s only temporary. Just like the brown craziness of the branches and brambles.  Everything will get sorted out when the leaves come back ready to sail with the wind. They’ll lift the confusion.  The sky will open to many kinds of blues and close with purple evenings. 

It’s definitely time for a nap.

 It is not so much a loss as it is a wholesale experience of your body and mind through time.  I’m more than ever astonished at my lack of knowledge about time. When I focus on other things, when life feels rich and everyday objects are vibrant and pulsing with their thingness, I’m immersed in a quiet joy and I experience a deep pleasure. 

 But I lack words, because otherwise, why use the word ‘thingness’.  Coupled with my lack of understanding of time I am doubly tossed by the stream of moving through it. It’s possible that I’m not moving through time alone. That is, maybe I’m moving through star dandruff, the detritus of the universe that comes invisibly through our air.  If nobody knows anything about the space around us with any certainty how could I expect to know about time and invisible space objects.

 Besides, it’s not just space any longer. Its dark matter and all kinds of molecules with and without strings. What appears to be empty space around us and around the stars is not so empty.  I chose today to remind myself that there is mystery.

 Mystery is not an insubstantial, vague, gauzy, or, even, fleeting thing or experience.  It has weight and can be measured by how it holds you and deepens your sense of belonging and rightness.  It takes very little effort to enter mystery.  When the small experiences in your life have resonance and seem to bring a sense of something larger you’re in that place of mystery. It does come and go. There’s no doubt about that. But it takes very little to bring it near again. Sometimes it only takes a break from your routine, or just noticing the sunlight or shadows.  It’s a hiatus that paradoxically brings back a sense of what might have been missing while you are taking a break from routine.

The process of renovations provides a backdrop for what is old and what is new to emerge as meaning in your home and create new definitions for your days.  Days moved by personal relationship to the living spaces in your life become a part of the stream of life and joy can reside and resonate within the bell tones of the birds, the bars of light through the blinds, the sense that early morning hours have their own molecules and feel as young as puppies.

In this place where mind is only a part of the minion, you are a leaf falling and lilting in the wind. You are a body hungry for tea and stew. You are here, standing or sitting as relationships build and come through you and to you as particle or wave; as sister or brother; as a friend that is connected like blood; as news of friend of a friend passing reaches you and one day shines in memory like sun hitting a mirror. This was a day you spent with her and your inner world opened to her and you felt validated and both felt the journey.

Alan Watts writes “Things (wu) are not so much entities as differentiations or forms in the unified field of the Tao.”  Everything is cut from the same cloth then sewn back into the quilt or knitted into the scarf or told in a story or held in the silence of the tall trees or moved by the wind to another town or taken from the garage sale and placed as a sacred object in your home or broken and stowed away for the right glue or moved through you to your heels or shared in conversation or taken from the table by a waitress or coming to you as rain or turning the page or the first music of beans as they hit the rinsing pan or the white milk in your hot drink or the sleep in your eyes that could be tear crystals of dreams moving into the day and falling into rhythm with the work and the hope and the loss and the hunger and the time that is with and without the benediction of the clock.  This is surely a mind that is not alone.

First maps count as much as all the edited versions combined.  If you have been moved along through time and haven’t realized it, no matter, ten, twenty years, even if you’re retired, remember, its okay that you forgot but now that you do recall that you had wanted to do something else, you have to start now.

 The sign you’ll attach to the nearest pole should read, “Start here.”   First signs count.  It’s okay if you decide to do calligraphy, and then change it to spray paint and graffiti style.  You can put the sign way high up so nobody messes with it or you can put it on the ground as if to say, take this same first step that I did.  But remember, first steps count and only yours matter.  Your first step is equal to a billion billion times a trillion first steps of others.

 If you were on the track but forgot or lost your way, that’s okay. Start now. If you didn’t do it because of time or money or children or fear or procrastination, whatever that is, or because because, it’s okay.  Remember, if you are following your dream right now, there is only one moment, one dream, one now, one right now. It is the only right now you should follow. All other right nows that follow are meaningless. Meaning only exists in the here and now, which is current and electric and, well, it’s like flying. 

 If you have to follow, why not follow your dreams. If it’s scary, okay. Everyone knows that. You’re not alone in that feeling. Take courage from those that did their thing but do your thing. Get lit by those that held a torch for their thing, but light your own fire.  Check out the ones that reached their goals and steeped in their work, but work your projects, steep your own time.  If you need strength, courage, hutzpah and gumption, hold your hand over your heart and know that the breath you take in comes from the same air that your heroes breathed and you live on the same earth they walked.  When you follow your dreams it’s then you’ll notice the path was always there waiting for you.

What does it mean to be a mountain? Is it always about strength or about what remains after the great forces of the ground beneath shifted and shaped the land? The mountain rests on its legs, folded but not crossed, arms forming the strong sides but ready to move or roll or toss a tree down the side or create a river from new rain.

There’s times I’ve seen a mountain in me and times I’ve known that there’s no mountain within at all, just the scree is left or the place where the river washed out a path going down the mountain faster than it came out of the sky.  I don’t know why I don’t just accept these times as easily as I do the others; bow my head and be grateful for being safe and loved. There’s a struggle to feel like a mountain but that is a mythical mountain and not the real ones you see as the land rises toward the sky. Real mountains, no matter how they might be touched and worked by time and hands, have stories of strength; but also stories of enduring, of letting go, of washing out, of being frozen or broken or holy. 

Today, feeling a bit afraid, not at all like I’d expect, I realize that there is comfort, if I let it come, in sitting like a mountain. There are no expectations, there is just the fact of it and that is enough for now.

There was a time when that sort of built-in facility would have been a blessing.  One could add swivel caps for the joints so that some grease and go juice could be added to sore knees until the snake oil kicked in. This notion is even less complex than the idea of painter’s pants personalized for all of our needs, depending upon your sex and life cycle, and of course the electronic accessories of the day which seem to take precedence over even convenient ways to carry feminine hygiene products.

What causes me more wonder than ever are the cormorants on the phone lines. One came in for a landing as I was going over the bridge.  There is no fantasy I can ever imagine where I could fly and land on a phone line. Yet the corms do this and then stay there for hours. They aren’t small and weightless like swallows or sparrows. Even morning doves, normally awkward and precarious in flight or when landing, would seem a better candidate for the phone lines.  Yet the corms defy imagination and find a home there, just above the small river waters, just above the bridge.  

There is a place within that is an island in the stream of things. Imagine it every bit as small as the phone lines for the corms but your ability to rest there every bit as good as theirs. Balance isn’t required.  Webbed feet might be, as well as access to your webbed being and your inner streams. Corms colonize waterways. They aren’t ocean-going birds. The road within might be a river after all. If you find your way there, go with the flow.

Imagine if your mind were as flexible as a yogi master. You could turn thoughts every which way.  You could find the right spices to make that dish you’re preparing pop out into the three dimensional world of open markets and fresh foods.  There would be a lot of activity but not the quickness or packaged world of the supermarket.  Your life might feel more connected.

Well, what is all this talk about connected anyway? If it requires energy than it’s not sustainable. So why connect with the natural world, or the slow cooking movement or the fresh vegetables from your garden or the local farmer’s market. It’s all a hoax capsuled in a world that is narrating your life as you read this. 

Why bother with the fascination of the twirly thing hanging on the elastic band? It moves one way and seems to disappear into the sky.  It turns the other way and seems to disappear into the space below it.  It’s an illusion. A trick of the eye.  Molly isn’t even paying any attention to it. The heat has captured her in it’s net of sleep.  There are dreams that go unrecorded and there are moments that are not even noticed.  But summer reigns, especially in August. It’s not over. The swimming is good through October and the waves never did pay attention to the calendar. Enjoy the summer, it’s still here and it’s not dictated by the store’s selections or the day of the month. It’s a seasonal thing and you either get it or you don’t.

Our everyday culture understands complexity and doesn’t get simplicity. We get multi-tasking so much so that we expect it. People rarely get involved in any single activity without another one also being introduced. We’re plugged into music or computers while we’re doing something. The community gardener is rarely without cell phone or headset connecting them to it. Very few people, at least in the suburban lands I travel and dwell in, are unavailable. When someone is there appears to be a sense of alarm or disbelief.  We all know this information now and there are variations and lots of stories about our new state of plugged in busyness.

This afternoon I read a note to myself. I wrote that I felt like an exhausted salmon. How ironic is their lives – only to make it back to their spawning grounds, the waters where they were born, to die reproducing.  How would I know that feeling?  I can’t really imagine it being so unlike a fish. But watching film of salmon coming back to spawn, only to be clawed out of the water by hungry bears leaves me with an enduring picture. There are so many ways to bring the reality of that image to me someone might as well have dropped me into a holographic pool. Every way I turn I see a pattern or struggle that is straightforward and uncompromising.

The salmon that is born in fresh water journeys to the sea. The journey is its life and the completion of its life is to come back to spawn. 

The bears on the rocks wait and burst into the water for their catch.  All that mapping that takes place and directs a salmon’s life, generations through time, and not accounting for the bears? 

Whenever I wrote the note about the salmon’s amazing memory for its journey, I must have been feeling resigned to certain patterns that weave an undesired complexity in my life. It’s difficult to comprehend the salmon’s ability to travel so many thousands of miles and then head back to where they spawned. It is one of the most remarkable events and life cycle on this planet. 

Is there something that pulls on each of us as we go through the complex and challenging days that we find in this world?  I am pulled toward simplicity, toward decreasing what is complex, in any area of my life, gaining more time in my day for what feels congruous and right.  Could I ever hurl my body up the rocky river paths like these salmon do?  Or could I burst out of the water to rise above white water blockades that add another gauntlet to the salmon’s return?

I know good tired and bad tired. Good tired is when you feel you’ve accomplished something or touched a place within that felt genuine. This could come from spending soul time with the palette or pen.  It could be exercise or cooking – going out to the porch for the basil in the window box and just following an unhurried rhythm as you made the marinara sauce. It could be a chore that you had been putting off and finally got to so that you had a sense of completion.

We often have to work jobs with complexity.  We come home tired but need to do more chores and expect to repeat the cycle five days out of seven. For many of us what pays the bills and puts supper on the table is not our soul’s calling. Our jobs might never even touch what we need to feel whole and complete. But if we’re fortunate, we know what does feed our souls and we find the time to do that. We find the time to do our soul’s work even after a full day of job and a full night of tending toward the business of living and its mundane requirements.

It’s not the same as a salmon going out to the wide sea and finding the mouth of the river it entered from years before.  But we have to overcome our own hurdles and piece together our own migratory paths to reach the place of our natal waters.  There is good tired and bad tired. There’s bears waiting for us some days and some days, after the leaps, the turns, the changes in temperatures, the sun streaming through, the rain dimpling the surface, the rocks narrowing the passage, the openness rushing all around, some days we can reach the place we once knew. We can smell it. We can’t always articulate what it is or what it means to us; but somewhere in the day or night, in the early evening or early morning we have our soul time.  Somewhere among the many days of paid work and time, there and back, you have a chance to be genuine; to feel the morning sun when its still friendly; to find your way back to what feels right and to remember who you are.

The waves have been incredibly beautiful.  There’s this pull back that you feel just before taking off. I heard a man explaining this to his young friend yesterday.  He was teaching her how to catch a wave. The riders were very pretty but  they were large enough that if you took one you’d be at the shallows too soon. It could be dangerous. I stayed out of the wave’s tease until there was a small one, they came every now and then, and I felt sure and safe enough to go along with it.  But I had never articulated that before about the pull back. There is a pull back before you go forward. When it pulls you back, he was explaining, that’s when you know you have it.  It’s like being loaded into the ocean and becoming a part of the wave. It pulls back to get its curl and that motion becomes a sling shot which can carry you to shore.

How you move toward the shore is totally up to you. It’s a rider’s choice. You can put your arms straight out ahead of you as if you were going to fly. You can keep your head down with your arms straight out or you can pull your arms back and along your sides and lift your head up. This sort of makes you look like the figurehead on the bow of a ship. These days, for some, this could mean there’s a thing or two causing drag and slowing you down. But you’ll head towards the shore nonetheless. And, if you don’t get tumbled you’ll have yourself a beautiful ride.

Here’s what happens then, and I can tell you this from experience.  You slide, you glide, and you smile and go with the flow. You head towards the shore and there’s no such thing as time or chores. It’s peace. It’s as if there’s nothing in your head, never was and that’s okay. It brings you out of time and into your element. There’s nothing better. Everything is beautiful in its own wave.