Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Accounting for this life, again












Glacier lilies, late summer.
Enamel plate print, 8/11


Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

-Rumi

Sitting in circle this September morning I located myself again. The first things my teachers have said upon coming back together for yoga and meditation have been reminders to open, to be aware, to remember that going inside is a connection and not a withdrawal.

But then, they speak of fall and the time for going in with fondness, and an implication of being ready to rest, where I, allowed to whisper "wait" to summer, would continue to go out. I'd feel the spring of my feet off the diving board and slide into the light liquid lake water, surfacing to breathe in rhythm with the turning of my head; I'd go onto the windy mountain trail and walk, then sit, with the 20 kinds of wildflowers I have to look up in a book when I get home; I'd grip the racquet and tie my shoelaces firmly before tracing swooping patterns in the air at the tennis court, which radiates the mid-afternoon heat. So I am listening hard to make sense of what they say. They all say it is time.

The speckled deer grazing with two fawns in our yard, which is now fenced (how do they come to be here again?) says so. She looks at me from 10 feet away, and says so, frightened and yet fearless in the truth. She says so again.

As does the crowded school hallway, although the children are in their classrooms, it's the parents who don't want to leave who mill about, trying to capture with shaking fingers the wispy tips of hair their babes have cut for the start of school, these aging youngsters who have carelessly turned 8 and 9 over the summer or will soon, this weekend perhaps, or this Christmas, which will be here tomorrow.

The kitchen at 6:45 am and the brilliant harvest moon in a purple sky at 8:45 pm say so. I haven't seen the kitchen this early of the clock all summer, although if I had it wouldn't have required the ceiling lamp turned on.

The brown grass, waiting for rain. The pumpkins turning a bright, raucous orange in the garden. The raccoons in the plum tree at midnight (chased away by steve) and again at 2 am (chased away by me). A truly fruitless chase. For us, anyway. Ha! All of them say the same thing, once I listen.

Dora says so, telling me, the first day of school, that when I heard her room door open and close at 5:30 am she was getting those little battery-lit tea candles set up to meditate. Indeed!!

So I found myself, incredibly, resoundingly, fortuitously, in circle. I listened to my teacher say "feel the vibrations on your skin, feel gratitude for this, your body." I heard it, the opening, the sense of the goodness of the work irrespective of pleasure, pain, the ease of it or the difficulty...there it is stretched out like a cat with every life accounted for, how does she do it? Each life fully lived leads effortlessly to the next, says she. Purrr.