These bright mornings pad in on cat paws, waking me sweetly. Arms of light push heat on the lip of its tide. I consider the presence in my golden room… invisible and welcomed companions pointing me towards some quality of my eldering. Some mornings I am surprised to find myself with new and different perspectives as I sit in meditative listening. I am drawn to different ways… to previously unfathomable acceptances, and I begin to lean heavily into ways that somehow miraculously ease the weight and tenacity of the struggles of a life of mind domination. I look at the things that held my attention with adamance in the past and know that now the keys hang closer to that prison door.
With age my skin and hands bruise more easily when I grasp too tightly or feel too rushed by the world. I see my grandmother in the skin of my arms.
On this morning between Thomas Merton’s elegance, Mark Nepo’s articulations and Byron Katie’s poignant wisdom, I am ushered out further from own known and trusted paths that I have walked so faithfully. I love the space that I occupy when I allow all of these ways of experiencing life to enter me and sit quietly in my heart. These skilled artisans gather silently in conversation inside of me, painting my inner walls with murals as particular and gorgeous as photographs…naturally full of the wild rhythm of Nature and humming a tune that makes synchronous order from the now hushed chaos.
All our life our psyches, as they travel the myriad of trails laid before them, gather stories and are moved by them, sometimes swinging back and forth on their lines…touching on meaning and sensibility. We need them as we grow. They knead us and shape and reshape us as long as we adhere to them. They help us to find our place in the family of things. But as we age that storied skin thins and tightens, choking off our expanse. We slither back shyly under the shadow of stone mutely awaiting the shed.
Then one day, if we are lucky, we wade into a great river called Love and we begin, ever so slowly, to peel back the encumbrances of stories that no longer stretch wide enough for our growing presence. We finally begin to accept the a wider embrace of what has been given, to merge with life on its own limitless terms. We begin finally to become the raw beauty of what is. In imperceptible increments we inch further into the river and begin to flow with. Our fists open and their contents float downstream. We watch. Our tight skin sloughs and floats on without effort.
As the tight waist of time loosens its belt, our choices, actions and desires fall as grains of sand quickly covered by more. Allowance becomes us and as the days lean back we are simply dancing in the theatre of life…finding ourselves and losing ourselves again and again without such effort, in this great art called our life.