I want to be a tree.  I want to be a rotting old huge ancient tree that melts into the forest floor.  I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want to feel feelings.  I don’t want to be dissatisfied.

I want to let the rain from the treetops nudge me season after season to soft loam.  I want the woodpeckers to drum on me.  I want the tiny chipmunks to hide their morsels at my feet.  I’m tired of feelings and thoughts and chairs and fingers and shit and tears and worries and money and relationships and walking carefully and driving in traffic and and and.

What a funny thing to be here as human.  What a hilarious idea.

All I have now are the fragments of memory I’ve tried to burn in my brain of the path between the giants of wood.  Oh that I would be them.  I call on the Trees and the River and the Rocks today to be my home within.

“The Beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favor: Hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.  But when we hear She is in such a “playful drunken mood,” most everyone I know quickly packs their bags and hightails it out of town.”  Hafiz

Yes.  Sometimes “Love manhandles us..rip to shreds all your erroneous notions of truth.” 

We can cry for love, we can love and leave, we can love and remove ourselves from the ravages of trying to “fix” those we love.  We can love and detach.

But I can’t love you if I don’t love me.  And the Bigger Me inside of me needs all my love all the time.  If I keep that fire burning, my love for you never ever goes out.

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house.  I would like to see you living in better conditions.”  Hafiz

HA, that’s for damn sure!  Fear does not dress up nicely.  But sometimes it is garishly tempting.  “Come and sit with me dah’in, and I’ll tell you a ghost story that will chill your bones.”  It says. 

Fear is sneaky.  I’m moving through a shop, minding my own business, and all of a sudden Fear says “You don’t have enough.  Ever. You NEVER have enough!”  And I am bereft, downtrodden, on the street, banished from my community in shame.

It’s a story that seems to be a neon flashing light in my head, blinding me without warning.

I want to pull the plug and move to another neighborhood.

Certainly sorrow is real, and struggle happens.  I am not arguing that.  But feeding the suffering and unending suffering can be a choice.  We all know someone with horrific life challenges that still somehow can smile and set the table with food, get up in the morning and move through the new day.

“What do sad people have in common?  It seems they have all built a shrine to the past and often go there and do a strange wail and worship.  What is the beginning of happiness?  It is to stop being so religious like that.”  Hafiz

It is amazing, upon investigation, what hidden beliefs can run my life.  Like “poverty is spiritual and being rich is rude.”  Hmmm, that’s NOT what the message of St. Francis really was.  And believing like I should sacrifice everything for others and forget about myself.  If my bowl is not running over with my open heart to the Divine, there is nothing to pour out to others.

I no longer go to the wailing wall of pounding my chest in guilt.  I’ve given it up for Lent.  Forever.

“There is a madman inside of you who is always running for office–whv vote him in?  For he never keeps the accounts straight.  He gets all kinds of crooked deals happening all over town that will just give you a big headache.”  Hafiz

Yup.  There is this monkey in my head that steals my wallet and laughs hysterically waving it in front of my face before it scampers away.  It screams when the clouds get dark and it huddles under the jungle leaves and disappears when I need support.

The mind is tricky and tells horrible stories of lions and tigers and bears coming to GET me!

That is why I like to laugh along with the heart.  She lounges with the Divine cougar–strong, confident and magnificent.  The Goddess and my heart can sit in all kinds of heat watching as the monkey slowly comes over and fans us, brings us frosty glasses of iced mango tea and washes our feet.

So worry grabbed my throat yesterday.  Squeezed tight.  Couldn’t breathe.  Froze my mind with fear.  Stories held me hostage–what might, what is happening, who did what, what will be?!?!

The antidote for this addiction is tedious, but eventually worked.  Release.  Let go.  Surrender.  Hand over.  Set aside.  Release.  Let go.  Surrender.  Hand over.  Set aside.  Release.  Let go.  Surrender.  Hand over.  Set aside.  Release.  Let go.  Surrender.  Hand over.  Set aside.

Over and over again and again.  Punctuated with quiet almost tearless sobbing in the tiny bathroom stall of privacy.  Feeling the feelings.  Honest with the heart.  Honoring the human idea of love wanting to help.

Knowing from years of experience that drinking or smoking or pills or shopping or gossip or fixing or even three soda pops won’t do anything for that plague of mental interrogation and anxiety.

So here You go.  She’s Yours.  Kicking and screaming, I place her in Your hands.  Right where she is, right where she always is.  I see your smiling face nod and gratefully take her to Your heart.  You are the ultimate Mother, after all.

It’s a question of mind over matter, and if you don’t have a mind, it really doesn’t matter.

That is such a Truth.  It is the mind that plagues a perfectly good morning with worry.  Missing persons, cryptic phrases, the unknown.  Whether the past or future, the mind takes all fantastic ideas of catastrophe and, like a bad fairy godmother, dresses it up in scary vampire clothes, ready to suck the blood out of me at any second I swoon.

Amazing how the mind makes up stories that seem so real based on NOTHING.  You’d think [sic] that with all that imagination we’d be swimming in fabulous inventions of ease, comfort and goodness.  Well, I suppose we are.  And then there are those mornings that just hit sideways.

I make up a new story today.  Today the green is smiling just for me.  The grandmother cedars await for me this weekend along the river.  I hear them whisper in the wind–“Stand.  And sway.  Stand.  And sway.”  I am rooted forever in Gaia, not in made-up memories of future fears.  My faith in being held–in all of us being embraced–in Eternal Good is the sun that never leaves the sky.  No matter the clouds, the steadfast Earth and warm love Sun of You are the essence of my presence.

When I get stuck in this body world, I’m out of sorts.  Nothing seems to work, my body is getting old and tired of this gravity game.  The flesh sags, the feet twist, the bones get tired.

If I am imprisoned in my feelings, I’m like a fly in the middle of the room locked behind some invisible fencing. I pace back and forth in the fog. 

My mind will hold me captive for days, weeks, a lifetime, telling me stories about the murky past and the hysterical myths of the future.  Vultures swarm and lions roar behind dark shadows of what should have been and with might be that make me freeze in fear.

But when I dive into Your Love, I am weightless, thoughtless, heartless–without any hurt of earthly timely calculated feelings.  I am free to swim without effort in the compassionate and endless waters of good and plenty, here and now, breath and stillness, ease and comfort.

Maybe it is in our hardware.  Maybe we are hardwired to hit some kind of physical wall in order to have the heart seek out more.  It might be that we are here specifically to “fail” in the material sense, just in order that we find there is something beneath the veil of today’s to-do list.

I’ve got one out there–a “to do” list.  It has been sitting for a couple days now.  People to call, things to do, bills, retirement, blah blah blah.  Clearly these tasks do not hold my interest unless I am at the edge of a deadline.

I thirst for a day sitting and letting the ocean’s horizon carve a memory into my soul.  I want to settle into the sand long enough that I begin to hear the rounded rocks whisper cosmic secrets.  I yearn to get off this lumpy camel ride and enter Your fragrant tents, rest on Your soft cushions and let You brush my hair.

“I am saved from all reason and surrender understanding.” (Hafiz again)

I wish I could do that.  But I ache with feeling that I’m just not trying enough.  That I used the wrong words, that I’m not investigating properly or asking the right questions.  I compare myself to others and I don’t see what they see.  They start to describe a concept and I follow and follow and then I’m lost, nodding my head as if I get it.  But I don’t.

I surrender into nothing.  I release my heart to forget it all and dive into the Divine forest of sweet breath.  I let the trees do the talking for me today.