start here.
Start with the clutch in your throat and the song in your heart, a Mississippi blues bass line that makes the floor tremble a little, the underbeat that makes every other layer richer, stronger like the dark dirt under the layers of leaves and twigs and cones and needles that smell of dead things made substance for growing things, for bulbs that may not put up shoots until the next spring when you have forgotten where you planted them and what kind they were but it won’t matter because there they will be, green and bright under that big fir that stands at the edge of the fence line and that gets good sun in its set-apartness and catches the downhill water of rainstorms and who knows how many more arisings will come from that day when you bent low and cleared a place to dig down a little and push the bulb into place and cover it with ungloved hands and promised it would have what it needs to take root, to rise, to bloom.
Start with the ending and let it be a sweetness of time well spent, of moments that stretched into hours and days and moon cycles of precious revealings, of a heart come alive with words and ways unexpected and fluent in a flow that feels at once familiar and foreign and that is met with the magic that happens only when one is receptive to the voice of another that rings true and introduces a new way of being with yourself in some evolving story that comes from beyond beginnings and that can live in you as long as you let it like a rose quartz in the window catching the morning sun.
Start with the words that have spilled like angel-speak that is formed when — in sich hineinhorchen — you….listen to yourself. You listen to yourself by trusting the words that will come as you move into a space of intention, integration, evaporation, restoration, mercy, truth, and unconditional expression. You consider all the elements that have settled into the beingness of who and what is carrying you and what and when and why don’t matter.
Start with thanks for the teachers, the sages, Etty Hillesum and the Ageless One and Hildegard of Bingen and Nature Herself and Tyler Ramsey’s new album The Lost Ages and Ann Randolph’s prompts and Mocha disappearing yesterday for an hour of heart-trembling and then learning that the neighbor’s chickens had become food for wildlife. And what about those two eagles in perfect parallel flight in the late afternoon hunting time and you being there to see them because you happened to look up from emptying the ashes at just the right angle to be facing the river…and the hunger and yearning and the power of staking a claim for yourself and seeing where you let other people call the shots and try your best to be consistent and then falter because there is so much to be and feel and wanting to share it lands wrongly sometimes but what if you didn’t follow the urge to become bigger, to reach, to risk…what is the worst that can happen when you know you can get through anything now, that you’re courageous in your own right and whether you are not enough or too much for someone else is only something you’ll find out by being yourself…
Start close in, with the way the sun falls on the arm of the sofa, the way the manzanita branches are spiring from your grandmother’s vase, the one that exhibits a dragon, a dragon that reminds you of all that you can be, of how the imaginary is the real and the real is sometimes the imaginary and all there is left to do is make it all beautiful one dragon-fire breath at a time….
