Life is juicy.

Life is unpredictable.

Life is crazy.

Life is lovely.

Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.

Just tell Her your plans for the day.  It cracks Her up! 

My Higher Inner Self is destined to focus on the best possible day of experience for me.  But this little human earth-bound ego body is naturally resistant.  The mind made up of time, tit-for-tat, here and there, competition, better-than, growth, and all those other facets of the world, get in the way of the Path of Spirit.

Today I intend an easy play between my ideas and the Way.  Rather than struggle and fight and argue and pout, I will just flow like the river over rocks–foaming and spraying, splashing and giggling.

Tell me another joke, Sweet One!

What is it to want something?  Why do we do it?  Is it an illusion that something will make us feel better, or is it real?  Are these urges formulated from childhood-skewed memories, or based on mature analytic experience?

Ha.  Like even analyzing feelings–including desire–would be a fruitful investigation!  As Kinesy Milhoune says, “Who said emotions had to make sense.” 

So bursting into tears is a sign that there is a belief going on, a story being told, beneath the surface.  I can try to tune into that story and make a different choice, see it from another angle, or merely remind myself that it is a story.  Or I can slam the door and obsessively seek another distraction.  I know from experience that method isn’t the best.

Off to the heat of the summer.  Remembering that when it is hot, it is just hot.  When it rains, it is just rain.  HA, and when you spill something all over your papers, it is just a spill.

What a funny thing, this human life is!

What if everything was always ok?  What if “I couldn’t fail” was true?  What would a happy girl do right now?

Be happy, enjoy the view, laugh at the slow stiffness, cool morning, time rushing by late for this and that.  Ha!  If everything was good, I’d pass on that daily shower, that’s for sure.  Pretend I was in a quieter country where fastidiousness was not labeled as “godliness”.  That “godliness” was indeed about living in the good.

I choose to live in the good today.  I claim the pause before each word and action to pull that goodness down into my words and movements and thoughts and feelings and breath.  Sucking on the goodness at Her breast.  I like that.  Mother’s milk for sure.

Sure, you’re right.  I’m screaming about the price of goods I’m forced to buy being a human struggling with the spirit that keeps reminding me that I’m more than that.  Ok, great.  I’m more than this, but I’m still here, feet on the ground, breathing, moving, eating, pooping, working, running, driving and on.

It’s hard to buy something that is invisible, endless, all good dressed up as “lessons”.

Excuse me, can I take that life while vacationing on a forested beach island somewhere?  Are you sure I volunteered for this?  I’m sorry, you must have the wrong person.

Actually, struggle is useless.  I have figured that out.  Like a chinese finger trap–the more you pull, the more you are stuck.  Like thrashing about in quicksand (at least as you see in the movies!), you’ll sink faster.  The more you pray for patience, the more you get those tough times where patience is needed more and more.

Give me this life.  I’m paying for it anyway.  Every avatar, deva and godhead on earth paid their price and sat there with a big grin on their faces–or not.  Do it anyway, said Theresa.

Today, I see the gift of what I’ve been given.  The only cost is to receive it and say “Thank YOU!”

It does, really.  And that’s the human part.  Our bodies were part of another person’s body, so when we are pulled from mom’s womb, there is discomfort.  We are taken from the soft warm cushioned life-pod and YIPES!  We need to breathe and the air touches our skin and relationships now happen in real time instead of dream time.

And for some of us, that was the lastof the good days.  HA.  I’m kidding.

Love is the womb and the illusion of our separation from the Divine is the pain.  It is replayed with each time we try to talk about love, touch love, sing love, dance love.  We are humans and love then gets tangled in the body, brain, ideas, lies, manipulation and betrayal–all because we’re trying to love ourselves in a twisted back-ward way.

Human love is really really a hard concept.  What with the body in the way.  But what if having this silly piece of protoplasm around my soaring spirit was the BEST IDEA EVER?!?!?

HA!  So here I am in the universe–one of the LUCKY FEW who get to be human, to see your brilliant blue eyes in your sun-blest face, to hear about the teenage-mom heartache, to wander through grief–all facets of love.

Lucky for sure.

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.