Venture forth.  Starting a journey, packing for a trip, setting up a canvas.  Beginning a creative project is exciting and seems to get me frozen in my tracks with insecurity.  What a hilarious think it is to be human and spirit at the same time!  Whose idea was this anyway?!?!

Mine.  Somewhere in the back of the fog before I dove into my mom’s womb, I set up this scathingly brilliant idea of life.  Maybe me and the Prime Creator had lunch and made up this story of ups and downs, in and outs called my life.  “Let’s add some of this,”  “Oh, what about a little snafu here!”  “Good idea, and you’ll meet another angel here, and…”

Just like a little brainstorming session on how to carve out new land of experience for the Divine to play with.  That we play together like a volleyball game, or sometimes like a relaxing or rousing game of croquet.  It’s seems lately like a slow baseball game tho, where no one is making any headway.  Time for a hotdog and peanuts.

As the Tao says, I am to sit and let the next right action come up to my feet and nuzzle my toes to step.  Little by little I am drawn to the next angel, game and treasure.

First the fish needs to say:
Something just ain’t right about this camel ride.
And I’m feeling so damn thirsty.

That’s a poem by Hafiz–a medieval Sufi poet.

What the heck does it mean?  Well, taking it apart loses it’s eternal charm to stop the brain and touch the heart.  Koans do that too–they don’t get processed through the brain.  In fact, koans have a purpose to STOP the brain, just like this poem.

We are all fish in the water of the Divine insisting that we are thirsty.  We feel like fish out of water in this human body and keep complaining.  If we can be aware that we are humans, that we are simultaneously at one with the Divine, then it becomes nothing more (or less) than a fabulous camel ride through an oasis and a desert of our own making.

This fish needs to see:
What a view from this elephant!
And the bath of Her womb is sublime.

Connect means to tie together.  Like two ribbons, barbed wire, or cables on a suspension bridge.  As humans we do this often.  Every time we speak to someone, pass them or meet their eyes, we tie ourselves together just a little bit.

Holding a new human beneath your breasts is quite an experience of tying two humans together.  With the blue and red twirling cord, this little new being is melted into your body and the eventual kicks and turns yield a paste-covered, whining kicking someone unraveling in front of you.

Through the years, the connection seems to fade.  They walk across the street without you.  Then there is the first overnight with a friend and the week at camp.  If things go well, they move away.  On their own.  Visits are now the brief connections, and catching them on the phone–or email or text–is a sweet simple teasing treasure.

I’m glad I don’t believe completely in this life of air, space and time.  I am happy that I know my connection with my kids is spiritually endless and I can nudge them like my cat leans into me.  We are always tied together in the foreverland of love.

Birds have a new wake-up time.  They seem to love it no matter how early She peeks over the trees to the east.  Tiny leaves pushing out of woody impossible branches.  Chartreuse shades appearing along the familiar routes as if it was the first time.  Bundles of layered blossoms hanging from gnarly trees along the sidewalk.  Flowers for angel bouquets.

What a disappointment that I have this human brain that keeps coloring my world with disappointment and dredging up what I don’t have, don’t feel.  Rather than being filled with wonder at myself–a human merely being in a brilliant bursting excitement of renewal.  Despite death, purging, destruction and despair–is spring.  After countries disappear and history is buried–there is spring.  Governments collapse, timeless monuments dissolve into the earth–and there, right here, in front of me now–is spring.

Let me breathe only spring today.  Let me be that hanging cluster of soft pink petals.  I claim the magnificent shining of a daffodil and the impossible red of a tulip.  I am the tiniest violet that sneaks through dirt and rocks to open and grin at spring.

There is no place like oooohhhhmmmmm.  Home.  Ohm.  I don’t think it is a coincidence that they sound a like.  “Once there was a way to get back homeward.”  That ache hits me often.  The feeling that there must be a way to feel at home, but more likely I feel like an alien on the wrong planet.  Or a foster kid that never had a home.

Seeking help to be restored to sanity seems hysterical when sanity never was the situation.  Maybe ever.  Perhaps I’m just too used to insanity to be satisfied with sanity and serenity.  It just doesn’t sound dramatic or exciting enough.  But then when the noise and whirlwind dies down, the emotional hangover is a drag.  And spending a life seeking excitement is turning out to be boring.

Ahh for a middle ground of grace between boring and adrenalin-pumped.  There’s a goal.

I claim the garden chair surrounded by tiny wildflowers, under a canopy of gently waving trees, yawning pines above me.  I sit with the sun warm on my back, feet up, basking in the light of Her love.  Always hhhoooohhhhhhhmmmmmmmoooooo.

Like shifting shit, I need an attitude adjustment.

I am safe.  I am loved.  I love you.  I love the Lover inside of me.  I am the chirping spring birds.  I am the tiny violet.  I am the sultry sportscar.  I am teflon.  I am brilliant.  I am beautiful.  I am that I am that I am.  I oooooohhhhhhhhmmmmmmooooooo throughout the day.

The little red maple tree outside my window is waving at me.  Are you trying to tell me something?  Is there something I should talk about?  What is your message.  “Go with the flow,” she says.

It is one of those days that seemed packed with duties, fun, people, and appointments.  Now changes have yawned open the middle of the day.  All dressed up and no party coming to visit.  I love unexpected open empty time.  Then all of a sudden I’m overwhelmed with all the projects I’ve been pushing into the closet that fall out and tumble on top of me when I peek in.

When young, it seems we dash into the waves, want to stand on the board and scream with the surf.  As the years on the body buffet our tired feet, the idea of a slow canoe ride, or a float above a slow lapping lake in the sun is the excitement sought.

We move, we rotate, we revolve in ever-moving cycles, this human ride.  Slow mo love waves.

This phrase comes from a Taoism–He who knows does not need to talk (or something like that).  But it is a conundrum being humans when we mostly talk and think.  Never stop thinking–or rarely.  And mostly what we do is tell stories, live the stories we tell, change stories and then try to live new stories.

Today I am telling about the bad stories in my past that helped me not want to live them like that anymore.  It’s astounding how being truly aware of my bad times is the best thing that has helped me be different.  But how do you tell that to teenagers just barely getting into their bad times.  HA.  They won’t believe you anyway.  Teenaged years are the most insecure and know-it-all times.  They are stretching their experiences away from their home–and taking everything they learned with them.

I reach out to be empty today.  I open my heart, chest, mind and soul to let the wind of drunk-dancing spring birds be the only sound that fills my body and the room around me.  I stand as a wind chime awaiting Her delicate sweet whisper at my neck.

So if we’re really spirits playing out this hysterical story of a life, that means there is no reality but what we make.  The mess on the desk, the disturbance of a friend’s comment, the ticking of the clock saying “you’ll be late if you don’t get going!” are all illusions of a truth I make up as I go along. 

I’m quite a good story teller.  But there are days when the plot gets slow or boring.  Other days when I ask myself, “where the heck is this going to go?!?”

Today Sweet One, let me make a good story.  One of natural beauty, singularly time-space breaking bird song, deep soul connections and giggles.  There is nothing like laughter that breaks all time, all space, all dimensions apart into a spectacular NOW! 

The problem with fierce conversations–when you go for the truth instead of pleasing someone–is that there is this pressure and ache in the chest.  What is it about the truth of a situation that seems so hurtful–inside and then spewing outside?

I guess it’s that there is that core fear of being unloved, disrespected.  Along with the hysterical lie that telling the truth is rude.  There certainly is a fine line between “You look like shit” to “You look tired.”  Or saying “I just don’t like you any more, go away,” and a more strung out carefully trod excruciating talk about how different the both of you are, distance, loss of affection, yada yada, yada.

I guess it’s those old cultural rules again.  If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.  Be pleasant. etc.  They all seem to support the very hallmarks of dysfunction: Don’t feel.  Don’t talk.  And don’t talk about your feelings.

Thank goodness, godness, grace and the angels that I can speak my feelings to you, to Her, to the clicking keys.  Like the prayer says: “In the mirroring light of my love, you are revealed.”  Me to me, She to me, Me to Her, to you, to Me and back again to the endless Divine.