CURRENTS THROUGH USELESS BAY

As I sat in my contemplative place yesterday in the heart of the woods, I opened my notebook and a bright orange meadowhawk dragonfly plopped immediately onto a note I’d written that said: “passion-do it for love, not for money.” These were notes I’d made after watching a brief video by Richard St. [...]

The important thing is to learn how to give to the life that is here, now. The losses I’ve experienced linger within me, but they too, are transforming into forms of creativity–generating by their absence more poignancy, compassion, and energy.

Can I stay with this? Can I stay here, in my body, with this pain, with this grief so large I see only the inside of a whale’s belly? Feel it fully, rock myself in the night, sob with it, see it, tell it all the things a mother-loving God knows how to say….

Maybe it’s the wearing away that matters so much. I blunder my mistakes into the too visible bluffs, and time mercifully erodes them, and sometimes takes them out in an avalanche. These erosions begin to make more sense, and I take my chances again on freshly exposed awarenesses,

Sometimes I wonder how we’ve come through all of these tangles and trip-wires–how we’ve managed to stay and work and cry and fight and fall, and get back up again, to find ourselves once again steeping in the sweetness of love.