Wakefulness

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." - Rumi

This sun is out, shining her warm growing heat on the earth this morning, and luckily, on me. I am in North Carolina, in Charlotte, the city of my name, and the blossoms are everywhere: redbuds, daffodils, cherry trees! The pale pink snow all over the streets wafting like waves on the streets, in the air.

Ah, spring, your newness is such a gift to me this year. I am so awake to see and ever grateful. I decided a little over two weeks ago to quit drinking red wine. Being really aware is the only way to get the lessons life is trying to teach me right now. Emotions rolling in like waves, and I am not running away. This feels like such an enormous step. How grateful I am for the strength at this very moment to have the courage to stand still and let the waves hit. Sweet center, thank you. Sweet rhythms of earth, thank you.

Solitude

Rosy the RV, where I live, is within hearing distance of this ocean. But this post is about silence. Rosy has become my cave. But a cave of delight now rather than dread. It was here that I grappled with loneliness in a very cold, wet February - when I realized I was completely mateless and alone, for the first time in eight years.

Maybe it is that spring is beginning and the sun is coming out. Or just grace. But I am honestly relishing this completely private space. I am not only learning to truly value my own voice, to love her, to cherish her. I feel the inner peace creeping in, growing strong and proud, like a scar over the wound of this winter. My heart is dancing freer with every day. I hung blue bottles, wrapped with silver wire, in my still naked crepe myrtle tree yesterday. They will move a little in the wind. The Gullah people taught that the evil spirits would be caught in the bottle trees, that the even the color blue protects us.

The German mystic Meister Eckhart, believed that nothing resembles God like silence. John O'Donohue, poet, priest and writer of Anam Cara, a book I am reading now (and quite seduced by) suggested that "the highly strung character of western life was explained by the absence of silence. "When you acknowledge the integrity of your solitude, and settle into its mystery, your relationships with others take on a new warmth, adventure and wonder."

I am called to more integrity. "The duty of priviledge", he said, "is absolute integrity." Wow.

Love Sorrow

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.

"Love Sorrow" is a poem by Mary Oliver, from the book, Red Bird, that was given to me last summer by my long time sweetheart, just as our love got lost. Funny. He is a poet, and learned to love her poems because I began to love them. Part of kissing an old love goodbye is welcoming sorrow and grief and that wounded child, too, that shows up all pouty out of the blue. Mary Oliver, whose work sustains me over and over, describes just what I have been trying to do.

What a surprise to find this poem only tonight, seven months later, in the book he gave me. Maybe that is love after all. The gift of these healing words is just that.