Wednesday 31 October 2018

All Hallow's Eve--A Heart's Transformation from Fear and Confusion

In Oct 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) released its most recent report on the state of the climate globally. Its prognosis was startling in its immediacy. Human societies must act now in order to stall the most grievous effects of increased warming of our planet. And urgently so. They gave us a timeline of 10-12 years to get our collective acts together. 

But how when we are hapless victims and perpetrators both?And what is there to do in the face of such overwhelming and urgent news? 

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing and personally had no idea where to begin beyond those measures my family and I had already put in place.


I was beginning to be given to despair.


I mentioned this despair to a person I admire greatly and who marches gracefully to the tune of his own heart, his very life work a lovesong to trees and the natural world as a whole. He said to me that for him, hope is prerequisite to breathing. It is what keeps him moving forward. And he trusts in the goodness of others. And he can't help but bear witness to the beauty all around


And I understood his words as though they were my own. Beauty of the natural world exists to sustain us so that we can protect the earth. A kind of symbiosis beyond the obvious life supports systems the earth affords us with—it is a symbiosis of the heart. 


And so I took a breath and held it all lightly trusting that a shift in my own heart would occur.

And then last night this awakening happened:


I knew to wait for this moment, trusting that it would arrive without even being certain how exactly it would present itself but that I would somehow know when it did.


Tenderhearted awareness--that is how I choose to respond to the immense suffering of the world. With the tenderness I offer my own children in their times of suffering and confusion. 

This too I offer the world. 


I have been lost as of late in the uncertainty and confusion I see around me. In the midst of dire climate change warnings and painful and confusing political and social upheaval I have been drifting like an un-moored boat from unknown shore to unknown shore in search of a sheltered harbour. I have identified too deeply with the confusion and pain of the world, internalizing it to the point of becoming it.


But tonight on my yoga mat I arrived at the harbour I had been searching for in vain as though it was outside my bones and breath. My bones and breath. And all I had to do was lay them down prostrate before the world, on my own living room floor in order to find what I had been looking for.

I arrived back home in myself with the same sense of being received as my own little two year old self did at my grandparent's upon my announcing I AM HERE...I arrived at a place of  humility and acceptance and welcoming and love. 

This world is swirling and twirling about in a vast sea of space with room enough for all possibilities to unfold. Mine and yours included.


In my own fear and confusion I had not allowed any of the immensity of that vast sea of possibility to truly permeate my thoughts and actions. 

Space---and time---those strange companions that my unusual brain has struggled with for so long came together within me last evening in a dance of joy so profound that I realized that I do not have to do or be anything or anyone other than  who I already am. 

Nor do you.

The simple act of being, of existing and bearing witness to this world is all that is asked of me and any of us.


Be and bear witness. That simple.


And I came to realize once again that when I fall open-hearted into the arms of that vast expanse of universe I can trust that my very existence contains the fullness which I so earnestly seek. 


I need look no further, it is there--here-- in the moment of my relinquishing from the stranglehold of self. The very act of trusting in the larger processes at work and bearing witness to the unfolding is all that is asked of me. 

Of any of us.


Compassion, non judging, a field of love so wide that even to call it a field is restricting.To call it love restricting too. That field of awareness which the poet Rumi so beautifully spoke of is where I found myself. Conjoined inseparably to the nameless void containing all is what I had become.

When I fall into that place of trust I fall out of all the things in life which hold me back--fear, judgement, a sense of lack, resentment, exhaustion and I fall open-heartedly into an awareness so spacious that there is room for everything to unfold. 

Falling into the unknown can be a life changing experience.

There are endless parallels and portals into my yoga mat experience in the natural world if only we have the hearts and minds to see them.


Over the past several days I have had the great pleasure of watching the hardwoods near our house release their leaves. The way they swirl off the tree is an ecstasy itself. 

The first day I noticed our Maple letting go there was nary a breath of wind to incite the riot of leaves as they took leave and fell. I watched rather breathless, knowing that this was their moment--that the urge to fall had grown so huge within them that nothing could hold them back. 


I felt honoured to watch their little copper faces catch the morning sun as they downturned swirling towards the still green grass. And I felt a little heartsick too. 

Time passing before my very eyes and almost frantically so. 

I tried for a few minutes to choose a leaf and watch it make its way to the ground but I kept being interrupted by another and then another leaf. I noticed my heart rate beginning to increase to match the madness of the swirling and had to pause to catch my own breath.


Each departure so singularly beautiful I felt as though I just might cry.


All of a sudden these leaves were my beloveds; dear friends whose life span I had witnessed from bud to leaf and whose season of life was waning, dry and muted now in late October. 

A fullness come to pass.


And it came to me upon my mat this evening after my own dry patch of soulless disconnection to my life that I must hold it all with tenderhearted awareness. 


The suffering in my own household, the pain, the uncertainty and confusion. The tiredness, the fear, the forgetting to be kind to self before all else so that I can be kind to others.


And in that moment my heart grew to accommodate the whole world and all the suffering parts with such a measure of compassion and clarity and purity that despite my tiredness and the late hour I knew I had to write this out to share with you.


The paths through the darkness of this era in which we live are there before us if only we have hearts that are brave and willing enough to trust in their very existence.


The paths will show their way through our very willingness to act out of kindness and open-heartedness. They will be revealed to the degree in which we are willing to look with truly open eyes of awareness and hearts and  minds of acceptance.


We are victims and perpetrators both but there is no one person to blame for where we have found ourselves. Multitudes and eons have brought us to this moment in the universes' expression. 


But we are here and this is the truth before us and so we must bear witness and act accordingly with a loving responsiveness we would offer our own beloveds in their time of need. 

After all, we are all of the same flesh and breath and sea and bark and bone and petal and rock and crawl and dance and slither and swoosh of falling leaf. 

There is no separation. 

We are one.


And so I've come to the conclusion that there is nothing to fear and everything to gain from our willingness to tend to this world with a mother's tenderness for her suffering child, with the graciousness and humility of the wise, with the kindness and urgency we would wish for our own healing and wellness.

The task before us is a large one but I know we are up to it-- otherwise we would not have been called to do so.

In love and beauty.
Thanks for reading,
Jill






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