In my next life, or maybe it was my last life, I want to be that first bird that starts singing her heart open and true in the dimming morning light before dawn.  I want to wake up thrilled at the smell of the sweet earth, excited to be alive, all my tiny antenna bones vibrating with the brilliance of spring.

No human story of tired bones, arguing voices about too many useless meaningless tasks, showering, packing, remembering, planning, shopping, organizing, notes, duties.  The stories are so captivating–as if truth.

Yes, let me be a pre-dawn herald, with the All of me calling to the world for raucous celebration, shaking up every neighbor to a new day.  “Wake up!  Wake up!  We’re on earth again!  It’s so beautiful!  You’ve got to see this!  Wake up!”

The trees wave.  The ocean waves.  The breeze waves too.  Maybe that’s what human life is all about–riding the waves.  Up and down, back and forth, in and out.  Just riding the river–sometimes in rapids that threatens oblivion, sometimes so slow it pretends to be boring.

I think it’s in that pull back that I get impatient, wondering what I’m doing in the fallow valley.  I forget about movement and the rhythm of my breath and the seasons.

Let it be today like a cradle.  I will rock and roll with the bus, the calendar, the phone, the meetings, the rolling of the sun from one side of my day to the other.  She has her hand on the small world where I rest, pout, scream and giggle. If I can be still enough, I can hear Her sweet lullaby that makes the stars dance.

Lots of earthquakes and a volcano spouting from under the glacier in Iceland.  Mud everywhere.  The very ground beneath us dropping out of sight.  The Church rumbles with rumors and scandal.  Polish leaders wiped out in
a crash.  Neighborhood geography shifted beyond recognition.  Drastic emotional upsets.  Upheavals in structures, in patterns, in thinking in conventions. 

How does a little piece of protoplasmic human, tiny on a modest planet near an average-sized sun, manage to find a rooting reason to stay on the planet?  Well, some obviously decide otherwise and take off with hundreds beneath rubble, falling into the ice and sea.  But what about us here still?

What is the most emotionally flexible thing we’ve done?  How can I stretch even further the envelope of patience and emotional expectation?  How can I provide a soothing escape from the collapsing patterns without diving into inebriation to hide?  And that phrase that repeats itself over and over again in my head: “Everything you know is wrong.”  Just can’t be true.

Can it?  And what if it is?  What if the street I live on disappears?  Where do I go without a job, my family, my car and the very road I follow each day?

I find a new route.  I step over the fallen walls.  New horizons come into view through the ashfall.  Bonds and bridges appear with those sharing stunned faces.  We are shifting and I bend at my sore knees.

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.