I can look directly at the sun this morning.  It is a clear orb shrouded in a thick barrier of clouds.  Maybe it is only in the shadow of doubt that we can recognize the magnetic truth of Spirit.  But even that awareness just points me in the direction.  I can still be in a deep valley, seeing only the light from late morning to early afternoon.  Feeling self-imprisoned where I only have an hour in the day to stare at a patch of blue between towering walls.

As always, every hint of surrounding green defies this limit–devouring the yellow invisible light.  But I eat the purported “comfort foods” when I am out of my “comfort zone” of habit.  Some change sets me into a different light, the gravity shifts, magnetic north is off.  But the food lies to me and hurts later–like any mindless addiction vigilant to distract me from the changing landscape.

My booted foot is unafraid of mud, but my so-called heart of faith is timid and grips old pathways and illusions of comfort and safety.  Deep black mud.  Gnarly roots.  Swarming gnats–the normal forest morning.  Doubts, sefl-pity & irritation–normal human snafus.  As I keep walking, I’m now in an open field and a clear path. 

And look, the sun is shining through the clouds from over my shoulder.  Gently reminding me that I am the shadow that I dance with.

Today I will let the Greatness fill me up, let the Presence take over my life, do all my tasks today, and I will just watch the sun, listen to the coded messages of love in the birdsong, and allow my Sweet Sister to do the shadow dance.

Lots of people swear by prayer–ha, nice juxtaposition!  That is, they try some kind of repeated words often directed to a Higher Power or the Universe in general, and they see and feel release from their concern.  I think it is all about changing the vibration in the body.

Singing, dancing, humming, speaking a nice word over and over all have the gift of changing my vibration.  Thus, they are all a prayer for me.  After years of living, I recognize that I am not the Queen of the Known Universe (but that does have a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?!), and that there may be a Queen, or a King, or a Force, or a Path, or a Vibration that soothes and creates.  Even as a child I knew that I did not create a tree, so there is something out there that started this order and beauty called Nature.

Having wrestled with the mind inside of me that can hold me hostage with hysterical hypnotic imprisioning walls, I’ve found that a good prayer guarantees to change the vibration of the mind’s anxiety.  As if the mind is a wailing over-tired child, I can rock it and soothe it with soft monotonous words and tones: “ohhhhmmm baby, all is well.  rock a bye my baby.”  And the mind’s eye rolls up into its head, nodding while fighting the eyelids that are too heavy to hold open and the busy brain is soothed to sleep.

I rest in the lap of Mother, snuggled close to Her soft body and easily surf the lolling waves of Her lullabye of love to me.

I’ve been orbiting around someone else’s “problem” as if it was mine to solve.  As if they should “solve it” as a sign of their respect for me.  Hysterical to see it from that point of view, but I have to thank my spiritual mentors and witnesses that have led me through massive mudflows, salt water tears and stupid hypnotic stories to get to that horizon.  Seeing the fabricated tale of woe, I choose to shift my path.

Maybe that’s why the old seem wise.  They see the brief passage of life, allowing the heartaches to fade and the glory days–sunrises, mountain tips, baby smiles–to rise up.  I choose to allow the fun part of mud, rain on the umbrella and storms at sea to sink into the landscape of life.  Shadows showing off the sun.  Burning light of fire bowing to the green sprout in a charred forest.  Mud yielding to flowers–and back again to charcoal and oil, diamonds and death and life again. 

Perhaps the human mind is meant to be a witness and to tell stories so that for a swift breeze they hear the leaves on the trees clapping their hands in delight.  And then a new direction for a new story to be told.

Oh, what a task it seems, to face Her soft light and to keep my eyes, heart, mind and body magnetically facing Her beauty.  If I could do that eternally, I could be maybe as magnificent as the blue-green orb called Gaia, dancing infinitely in Her gaze.

Have you ever been moving down the path, skipping and humming to yourself, minding your own business (key hint there), and SLAM!  You are crashed into a tall, wide, thick wall with one word painted in big letters: “NO.”

There is no discussion, no appeal, no explanation–and certainly no understanding.  Just “NO.”  Can’t go this way, no entrance, no exit, no detour–just no.

For someone raised on “We can do it!” it is a shock, and I’ve spent much time, years, heartache, determination, manipulation and control working to change that word.  After many wounds and scars, I’m a little slower as I approach–or rather, I recognize the immovability after I awake from the coma from mindlessly hitting the wall.  “Wow.”  Maybe this is what they call the “will of heaven.”

So if I am eternally safe, infinitely loved, completely lovable, thoroughly lovely and intrinsically a treasure in the eyes of Heaven, what are my choices?  Being human, I just need to recognize it as a “YIELD” sign.  Give up.  Surrender.  Take a break.  Stand back.  Take a look around.  The wall does not go on forever.  Usually it is a barrier to a very narrow path surrounded by other endless opportunities.

What hypnotizes and captures me–takes me hostage, actually–is the myth.  The story of what it “should” be.  Astoundingly concrete, these tales were spun from explaining generations of unskilled behavior, rationalizations of changing times, desperate attempts to maintain status quo when it was abandoned centuries ago. 

Holding Her hand, I stand easy in front of this wall and let the Love of Her Heaven enthuse my heart, body and mind.  In this Presence and the eyes of love, I see through the wall and embrace the Spirit of “No.”

Both of these words talk about the breathe–to breathe in, inspire, and to exhale, breathe out.  So when I breathe in, I am able to be inspired.  It’s wonderful that the plants help me with the intake of oxygen.  And I can release my old, used, tiresome beliefs in my exhale and the same graceful plants can use it up.

But my back and forth insane pendelum between entitlement and martyrdom has got to stop.  I choose now a different playing field–beyond right and wrong.  Neither seem to work for me.  There is a racket ball slamming against a small concrete room in my head.  I can let it bounce around as long as necessary–without acting on it.  Every side of the insanity seems like a good idea and then the other side screams it’s rationale. 

So today, I breathe in for inspiration around me and let go of the argument in the exhale.  The truth of love denies the lie of duality, either-or, tit for tat.  Even that well known carpenter from the Middle East came to break open the illusion of tooth-for-tooth.  Praise that truth.

Water is the symbol of emotions.  Earth is the symbol of the material world–humanity, things, money, value, skills.  Put them together and sometime you have mud.  Feelings and so-called perceptions/facts equal illusions, assumptions and conflict.  Both, I think (sic), are earthbound.

That is, they are part of this earth-world human game we choose to play in this existence.  “Oh goody!  I get to have feelings and personal opinions based on my view of reality!  And then I get to play bumper cars with others that have their feelings and personal opinions based on a different view of reality!  Oh goody!  Bumper cars!  What fun!.” 

Not.

Speaking of feelings that bump up against another does not feel good.  But it is a round table cyclical existence here, and seasons are constant.  The only sure thing about life is that there is nothing you can be sure about.  Even seasons are different.  New flowers, pruned branches, mud-caked bare fields, new nests.

Just walking in spring mud today.  Gaia never leaves me and I never leave Her, no matter the tears, the feelings, the rain or the truth of everlasting sunshine.

Every day is truly “Earth Day,” and what a brilliant idea the Creator had–or all those design angels She has–to spread the infinite hues of green throughout the land in spring.  I throw myself on the green path of heaven today.

Standing in a young poplar grove, all distress evaporates.  Tiny butterfly leaves popping out at eye-level busting with infant smiles.  Youthful energy crowding me like walking into a gaggle of 7 year old giggling girls.

The gravel beneath my feet reminds me what it is to listen and witness without comment, to allow the chatting as it comments on my every slow step.  No response is required; just graceful presence.

Grass field so green it is deep vermillion with damp night’s rain.  Leaves begin their slow unfolding.  Lanky limbs sensuously spreading veils, creating private pathways, whispering fresh fragrance.  Deep greening deep healing deep soothing deep shading deep nourishing deep loving deep watering deep feeding of my soul.

May I be forever green.

A wooden palette leans against a wire fence in the back field tall grass of the dog park.  Feels like me.  Does it feel useless like me?  It once was a proud tall tree, then cut and sliced and sit and structured.  It spent years as a powerful support working with fork lifts holding tons of weight.  Then used for flotsom & jetsom purposes, it leans in the rain, in the sun, in the snow it leans.  I doubt it feels useless.  It smiles in the sun, drips easy in the rain, glistens proud in the frost and wedding blushing white in the snow.  Only a human creates that illusionary vacuum of value in herself.

Pesky beliefs and expectations of being of use as the purpose of life.  A human constantly “doing” instead of “being”.  Only a human with this idea of a conscious mind would feel disatisfaction to ask such a question.  I doubt if the gravel grouses as it is pulverized into fine sand, or the wood chips break down at the small splinters of their existence.  So is my purpose to be racked with this belief that I am useless without a purpose just to get to the resolution of being still?

Ok, well, today I practice being still and knowing that nature knows–and being on a need-to-know basis, I really don’t need to know more than that.  Follow cues, speak when spoken to and appreciate the weather just as it is.

As if the world was given to me as a gift of love–bird call love songs, sun warm embraces, breeze caressing my cheek, sage fragrance smudges, green healing curtains of tiny new leaves.  Resiliant love of new briars returning after all pruning efforts.  Heart full and now ready to overflow.

That’s my chant for today.  Keeping in the Presence of the present. 

Why does the feeling (not the fact or the truth) of uselessness in view of no job, dwindling money, make me so sad?  Is it all because of the years of forming the belief that my worth is built on what I am doing?  Working for the “man”?  Achiving, producing and serving others only? 

How often do I profess to others that it is their very being that makes them intrinsically worth of all good?  I hate the word “worthy” anyways.  It seems to imply value based on an exchange.  What is my exchange rate–my market value–based on what I produce?  Thus as unemployed, I am worthless, without production, fallow.  What a malicious lie based on hypnotic cultural rule.

The opposite of that belief is always proclaimed by nature.  The brilliant omnipresent dandelions that defy all weeding and poisen.  The lilac bushes greening without a thought that we only love them for their blossoms whose fragrance sends me back to my mother’s soft gray eyes, home, cardinals, safety and tears.  Ever-present grass that humbly and without a thought crack concrete.

What a silly idea to be wrapped in a tangled human bun of flesh to doubt the easy soothing place of All That Is.  Here and now.

Today’s walk kept me stepping, one step at a time, moving forward, doing something when it feels these days that I am doing nothing.  Moments of relief of duties interspersed with longer hours of minutes sitting reminding myself that I cannot push this time of human frustration: no work for society, no job, no income to match expenses, investment for future cloudy return.  Continuous surrender to the season.

A tiny violet, maybe two, hardly a half an inch wide, snuggled close to the city-side of the sidewalk, almost overlooked, tickled me with her song.  “I was a seed too–and look at me now!  The sidewalk can’t stop me and the grass can’t choke me–here I am perfect purple smiling at the morning sun every second that I can.  Then I too will retreat to leaves and seed like you.  Good day!”

She said that in a split second.  It is my meditative contemplation today: be a good seed.  From the flower of my mother, born this month so many years ago, prepared and nurtured by life, packaged into a face and personality, picked from the rack and now ready to plant a garden, the seeds sit on my table.  Even when I am eventually planted anew, the roots take time to wiggle in the dear earth, grabbing hold of the soil and anchoring the soul to a new harbor.

So as I float adrift now and again, the seeds of me are safe, inevitably and easily ready for planting.  Mother as close to my cheek as my old skin, I lean into You and You lean into me.