My dear goddess-woman, oracle-friend, Ann Swanberg, penned the phrase, “Prepare to be Gifted”. Today, her words allowed me to peek around another corner. I was flooded by the knowledge that once you’ve prepared to be gifted, your great challenge is to then accept the gift.
Several medical crises with my failing, 80-year-old parents, have led me to deeper contemplation about aging and choices about how we age. There is no room in my consciousness, for anything other than that I will live a full and vibrant life.
On my drive home through the mountains last night a thought roared through my head - “I want to squeeze everything out of every moment of the life that I have left to live”.
That is my daily practice.
I feel a strong, nostalgic pull towards home. Today that pull causes me to reflect on Bernal Heights in San Francisco, the home and neighborhood of my birth. My immigrant grandparents lived there and my parents were born and raised there, when it was a strong, diverse immigrant neighborhood. There is a special heart connection that leads me there several times every year.
“When Imagination walks, she writes letters to the earth. When she runs, her feet trace postcards to the sun. And when she dances, when she dances, she sends love letters to the stars.”
- J. Ruth Gendler, The Book of Qualities
Behind Me—dips Eternity
Before Me—Immortality
Myself—the Term between
-Emily Dickinson
I’m taking a lesson today from the pelicans I watched in flight this weekend. A short period of flapping of the wings and working on forward momentum, then effortlessly gliding; catching the draft of the air around and silently soaring.
What is this human thing we do in taking things for granted? The everyday living, breathing, fiber of our experience? Our years together have woven themselves into my fabric. Gratitude doesn’t begin to capture acknowledgment of the gift. It’s something beyond - perhaps prayer.
Uphill Climb
One of those uphill climb kind of days, when things are moving at a crawl and are more difficult than I’d like for them to be. At the bottom of the staircase, beginning the assent, where I can only see right in front of me. Slowly, deliberately, deeply breathing.
Find Someone to Riff With
I attended a workshop that went to the core of collaboration, using music as the vehicle to catalyze change - Improv as the way to get there. One of the greatest take-ways for me was making sure that you have someone to “riff” with.
Miriam Webster defines a riff as “a rapid energetic often improvised verbal outpouring”.
Magic happens when you have someone to riff with - on anything, about anything, about nothing at all. It opens the channel to creativity and finds places within you that you had no idea existed.
Until the cool, November day when we stepped into our new house in the mountains, I never really heard silence. I thought silence was a void; an absence of sound, something that quietly settles into you. Instead, silence is booming sound with a voice that wakes you up to everything.
Excerpt from The Call
“There is no waiting for something to happen, no point in the future to get to. All you have ever longed for is here in this moment, right now. You are wearing yourself out with all this searching. Come home and rest. How much longer can you live like this? Your hungry spirit is gaunt, your heart stumbles. All this trying. Give up! Let yourself be one of the God-mad, faithful only to the Beauty you are.”
-Oriah Mountain Dreamer
