Writing Directly Out of the Vast, Deep Mystery

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IMG_2151

when you are struggling
in your
writing (art).
it usually means
you
are hearing one thing.
but
writing (creating) another.
— honest | risk

from salt, by nayyirah waheed

 

 

We all receive what wants to be created through us in different ways. As a writer and creative, I get images and a sense of what wants to be written/created. I can feel it, but it’s rarely clear. But even then, there’s always enough to begin, enough to take that first step.

That’s really the most important piece. To take that first step. To begin.

But what happens along the way to cause the struggle?

I was talking to a friend today about writing. We were sharing with each other about our writing process and how hard it can be sometimes to put words to what we ‘hear’ or ‘sense’ wants to be written.

I usually get a sense of the writing that wants to come. Sometimes it comes in images, other times I ‘hear’ something. But to write and create, my mind has to communicate what I sense, see, and or hear. Something deeper than my rational mind, the unconscious, is showing me the writing in its own way, but my mind must take that and put it into words. My mind must communicate the creation into form.

Sometimes I’ve noticed that my mind has a hard time doing that because there’s too big a gap between what I sense and what my mind can translate into words. So my mind fills things in as best it can and what I end up with isn’t at all what I sensed or heard. I’ve lately found myself sitting here at my laptop, fingers poised to write, while my mind attempts to find the words. It’s such an interesting thing to witness in the moment because I am aware of a felt sense of frustration within me – seeing/hearing what I’m trying to write and then trying to find the words and phrases that capture it.

Sometimes, too, the writing just flows. There is no gap. The mind is open and free enough that there is no separation in me, the one who is writing. There is only writing.

And then other times, I notice that my Voice of Judgment (VOJ) jumps in almost immediately, judging and criticizing what comes even before the mind gets it down on paper. It’s like an immediate judgment of what comes. It’s crazy how fast the VOJ can grab a hold of the steering wheel and take you right off course.

But really what I want to do is communicate what I am hearing and sensing. That is all I really want to do. It’s easier for me through photography (the image above) and dance. I don’t edit. There’s no judgment. There’s only the expression. But writing has been harder for me to lose the VOJ, the editor that wants to edit before there are even words on the page.

Can you relate?

We want to get it right but so often we come up short. It’s the mind somehow thinking it has to ‘make it happen’, which is really way beyond its job description of simply communicating. It’s trying to play ‘Soul’ rather than letting Soul be Soul and being, doing what it was created to do.

I’ve found that writing regularly helps to shorten this gap. A regular writing practice helps the mind get used to the practice of writing what it receives.

And, what I’ve found always brings me back to writing more naturally and effortlessly is writing about what brings me joy, or what I love, or what I care deeply about. If I’m trying to write something because I think it is what others want to hear, I never do so with much ease. I struggle to get the words out and once I do the piece can feel stilted and tight. And after writing it, I do, too. Because I’ve left Soul by trying to make it happen.

But when I write something that brings me joy or pleasure, then the writing flows. The soul can be heard and felt. When this is true, Soul is so close. That’s also true about writing in my Writing Raw groups. I love diving into writing when I’m surrounded by that sisterhood. Just the energy alone of the circle is a big support. And in these circles, we write from deep within, from the texture and beauty of Soul. We write directly out of the deep and vast ocean of Mystery. But you don’t need to be in a circle. You can begin to deepen your own practice of entering into this deep and vast mysterious ocean that is the source of all that is created.

We are so deeply interconnected through something much greater than any one of us. When you write what brings you joy or deeply moves you,  and you faithfully express it as you hear it, you move those who feel a similar way or need to hear it, or something else related. There is a connection. There is a correlation. We do meet our audience through our words but not in the way we ‘think’ we are supposed to.

Something greater than any one of us connects us through the deep place of love within each of us. It is this that drives creative expression. It is this that we honor when we write what we hear. And our writing becomes so much easier through this honoring.

Thank you to nayyirah waheed for her poem, available in her profound book of poetry, salt.  And thank you to Tanya for reminding me of this poem.

 

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Reclaiming Flesh is Holy Work

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The innermost layers of a woman’s flesh hold stories whose endings can emerge as the most beautiful tales of redemption and liberation.

Redeeming flesh is not easy; yet it is holy work.

~~~

This is a vulnerable post. I won’t tell you details, but I’ll tell you I’ve been weeping – you know that kind of crying where the tears just run out your eyes and down your cheeks? It’s as if the tears have a life of their own. They just flow. You aren’t completely sure why they are flowing, but it is clear the tears know. They flow out from these innermost layers of flesh, places and pockets where pain from long, long ago were secreted away.

There’ve been many little moments this week that seem to be bringing forth these tears – moments where I can feel love wants to move through me, guiding me, yet I feel frozen because of fear. While the culture, and of course my own ego, would tell me I am right to trust my fear, my heart just breaks when I do…when I choose fear over love and offering myself to the moment at hand. These are real life moments, with people I do not know. Love wants me to move toward them in moments that might very well be unsafe. Yet, I can feel the love, and I can feel the grief when I do not move with love.

This week, though, rather than getting upset with myself for my responses, probably because I’ve been softened inside and out these past two weeks, I find these tears flowing from the heartbreak of seeing just how painfully, and beautifully, human I am. And, yes, it is painful when I see myself choosing between ‘staying safe’ and offering myself to an unknown I can’t know.

And there’s been a big moment, an experience that’s really accelerated this ‘undoing’, something that has me feeling into these deep places and pockets where I long ago secreted away experiences too painful to feel at such a tender age.  In the dark, stories of rejection and abandonment grow into what seem like beasts too fierce for reacquainting.

At some point, these stories wake up and begin to make noise. They don’t like being caged. Like everything else in this world, they long to be free.

 

I can feel love behind these tears, right behind them, trying to make its way in on the tail of my tears. The tears soften my flesh and love rushes in.

It feelings like a river of undoing, like the river that is rushing is wearing away my resistance to love. I can feel that to choose love is to let go of a kind of ‘forced certainty’ I can hold onto when I stay insulated. It is forced because I am forcing it. I get that.

The river is rapid and insistent. Love is that way.

It is in these moments of choice that I come right up against my flaws and learned separation, and the habit of responding from fear. The stories the flesh holds about letting love in to these darker places put up some strong resistance. And I see how deeply the pain and shame of past hurts is burrowed into the innermost flesh in my body.

And the flesh holds stories about power and instincts, about unleashing and unchaining, and all the things that could happen. So many damn stories about this power within me

I remember it as a young girl – this instinctive connection to all of life.

 

I remember the power dancing with instinct as if they’d known each other forever.

But now, I sometimes feel like a lioness that has lost her footing. Her power is there, but the instincts aren’t fully conscious, so her big furry paws step guardedly rather than assuredly.

I sense this is why there is fear in some of my choices. When the instincts have been deemed too much or too powerful or inappropriate, they get caged where they can’t roam free. Instincts need to touch ground, feel the wind and sun, and be nourished with breath. They need to be fed and loved. They need to feel the earth.

Four paws that are in divine relationship with the earth know where to take that next step, can feel into the next step, and can sense direction and speed and gait. Four paws that are bound know little of these necessities.

 

The deep love a woman has for life, and her ability to hold the space for it, needs her instincts to ground it. We need this instinctual self to sniff and taste and hear and feel what is so. This love, this power, these instincts – they are all part of our aliveness, our vital life force. They are part of our creativity, and redeeming them out of the stories in our flesh is our necessary work, necessary for our own emancipation and the emancipation of our planet.

The process of reclaiming flesh is intelligent. Tears falling shows us something, especially when they fall of their own accord, as if flushed out of flesh ready to be free again.

Reclaiming flesh is holy work. Your tears can lead you across the threshold into these secreted places. And even though the stories were created in a time when it felt like true love was nowhere to be found, a river of love is riding on the tail of each tear, ready and waiting to inscribe ‘The End’ at the end of each story.

~~~

Update May 18th, 2015:

bafonbadge300pxIf you are curious about the journey of embodiment and coming to know again this sacred creativity, join me for my new course, Becoming a Force of Nature. We’ll be walking on four paws, feeling our instinctual way through a magnificent journey together. You can read more, here. The Early-bird price ends Sunday, May 24th at Midnight PDT.

 

 

 

 

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Unveiling Untruths about being a Woman

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Heart Remembering by Julie Daley

 

Coming to live the truth of who you are is not about becoming more of something, nor is it about fixing anything. Coming to live the truth of who you are is about stripping away the untruths that you came to believe about yourself.

I’m creating a complimentary guide for women and in doing so I decided to reach out and ask friends, colleagues, and readers to share their answers to this question:

What were you told/taught about what it is/means to be a woman
that you’ve since discovered is not true…and why?

I want to know, because I am clear that even though somewhere we KNOW these things we were told are not true, in our everyday world we are faced with the constant messaging that they are…and so as one friend wrote:

“Thank you Julie for the thought provoking question – my comment here would be – most everything that was shared here resonates with me – these things are not true – the confusing part is – we – or society lives or pretends for the most part they are true and hence we get confronted with them on a daily basis – we suck it up and quietly endure – or NOT!!!! : )”

There’s been such a great response, and women have replied that they are really appreciating reading the responses, that I thought I would ask you, my loyal readers, the same question. You never know when something you share will spark an important insight for other women!

There are a couple of options for sharing your responses:

    1. I’ve included the original questions and comments from both my Facebook page and my personal page here. You can respond directly in the threads if you’d like, and you can read the responses.
    2. You can also reply here in the comments, sharing the untruths you’ve come to see.
    3. And if you’d like your comment to remain private, you can send me an email at juliedaley (@) gmail (.) com or send me a private message on my Facebook page.

Please feel free to share the question with other women you know who have something important to add to the conversation.

I’ll be collating the responses into a downloadable complimentary PDF.

 

::

This one caused my heart to break open, because it is one that took me a long time to heal in my body:

[that women are] “NOT made in the image of the divine.”

As if this could ever have been thought, and taught, to be so!

 

I do know that it is helpful for all of us to become aware of this strong messaging we are bombarded with not only when we are young, but also on a daily basis.

While we may not resonate with all of the responses, reading them can help us have more compassion for ourselves, for other women, and for all people as we come to realize that both women and men (and of course young boys and girls) are being conditioned to believe so many untruths that keep us from living the truth that already resides in our own souls.

Thank you for sharing whatever you can! By naming what is untrue, we come that much closer to knowing and living the truth of our beings as women in this world. What we bring to the world, just as we are, is deeply needed in these times.

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A Sacred Duty

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Rose

“There is a relentless search for the factual and this quest often lacks warmth or reverence.
At a certain stage in our life we may wake up to the urgency of life, how short it is.
Then the quest for truth becomes the ultimate project.
We can often forage for years in the empty fields of self-analysis and self-improvement
and sacrifice much of our real substance for specks of cold, lonesome factual truth.

The wisdom of the tradition reminds us that if we choose to journey on the
path of truth, it then becomes a sacred duty to walk hand in hand with beauty.” 

~ John O’Donohue

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You Chose For You

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Put it down.

Put it all down.

Stop fighting.

Feel.

It is the way it is.

You did it.

You were scared shitless and you did it.

Breathe.

Breathe, again.

You are here.

You’ve survived…and you’re not diminished one damn bit.

While the voices in your head tell you otherwise,

You chose for you.

Never believe again, even for one second, that you are powerless.

While the voices out there would love for you to believe that you are,

they are wrong.

Be with your self.

Trust your heart.

Let it all go.

Be with,

Stay with,

You.

::

“heart-shaped candlelight” by Zolivier. Some rights reserved

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Love, Value, Desire and Truth

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poppy in prayer

What do you want?

What do you really want? That is what you will get. Not what you think you want. What you really, really, really want. If you really want what is true, it’s its own protection. ~Adyashanti

I listened to these words last night as I was working. I like to listen to Adya’s satsangs, just taking in his words and the transmission that comes through them.

I have a sense these words wove their way through me last night as I was sleeping, because in meditation this morning, I could see how deeply ingrained my thinking is to choose something that will please others, get their approval. It is fairly unconscious still…until now. I could clearly see it this morning.

And so as I noticed this, I wondered, “Do I even know what it is to choose what I want? Do I know what I want? Do I really know what is true for me? Am I willing to look, to know for myself? Am I willing to ask the hard questions?”

This comes down to being able to tune into this self, this being. This ego has been all about pleasing others (and of course the equal and opposite force of rebellion against that pleasing, but then that’s much more under the surface, but not as under as it used to be).

This coming into oneself, trusting the organic flow from within, trusting one’s own desires, is key to being an alive, creative being. And, it really doesn’t care about pleasing. It doesn’t know pleasing. It just is.

This flow doesn’t push or fight to be known; yet it is always here. When my fingers type on the keyboard with tenderness, I know the heart is open and what is coming onto the page is coming with love. Sometimes when I write, there’s a kind of forcing, or making things happen. And, of course, this comes out in the writing; even if the words don’t say it, it can be felt.

It takes courage…

It takes courage to be wholly oneself in a world so quick to want to judge, control and dominate. Yet, there is no other way to live a life of integrity. At the end of life, I want to have been an intimate and reverent lover of Life…all of Life.

Perhaps, it takes love. A love, though, that is unlike the love we’ve been conditioned to believe is love.

Subtle degrees of domination and servitude are what you know as love but love is different; it arrives complete just there like the moon in the window… ~Rumi

Courage comes from the heart, as does love. There is a root in common to both.

And saying yes to Life is what is needed, right now. There are many forces that want to control and dominate this creative life within us, our hearts and even our bodies…forces inside of us and forces outside of us.

There are forces choosing money over life, when they don’t have to be at odds.

Just this morning, a friend posted this:

…just heard from a project I have worked with in the past for women with mental health issues – they do such vital and beautiful work and all their funding is being pulled – so so sad and will lead to bigger problems in the long run – offering them beautiful art things to nourish them through this loss ….I don’t want to live in a society that pulls the money right from under the most vulnerable – these are mums and it will have a knock on effect on their children.

What we value…

Yesterday, as I sat and enjoyed a cup of coffee at my local café, I looked out the window at the morning as it was unfolding. There was a man bringing out a hose to wash the sidewalk down in front of the swanky restaurant directly across the street from me. As he washed the sidewalk down, he consciously and graciously kept making sure he wasn’t getting water on anyone passing by. He smiled the whole time he did his work.

For some reason, as I watched him, I thought of how we judge people by what they do. On most lists this man with a job washing the sidewalks would ‘rank’ fairly low on how valuable he is to society in terms of what he offers the world in his work. Yet, when I watched him he was diligent at what he does.

I thought about value and how deeply conditioned we all are to value certain things as better than others. I thought about what I really value, not what I’ve been taught to value, but what I REALLY value.

I value life. I value love. I value beauty, tenderness, and the truth. I value children and mothers and fathers. I value the heart and soul of each person. I value autonomy and community. I value doing work that comes from my soul. And, I value speaking up and out that which I’ve not wanted to speak.

These are what I choose to fill my life with, and what I choose to fill my work in the world. And I get to ask myself, how much am I honoring what I value? How willing am I to live what is true? How willing am I to know this love that arrives complete, just there like the moon in the window?

And, you?

What is true for you? What do you deeply value? Do you know what it is you desire that has nothing to do with pleasing or pushing against others? I’d love to know.

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For Longing

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A friend shared this poem, and I cried tears…

Tears for the beauty of these words.

Tears for the beauty that was this soul, this soul named John O’Donhoue.

Tears for the longing of the soul.

Tears for the beginnings of a glimmer of this knowing: “May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.”

His books, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom and Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, are gorgeous works. I’ve read them, and re-read them, and still I can tell I will read them again. While the words are gorgeous and full, there is something that weaves between the words that lights me up in a way nothing else does. Light moves through his words, through the pages into my own soul.

Let these words of his pour over you, filling the cells of your being with the love that is in every cell of existence. This is our inheritance. To know love like this. To know that God is longing for us with urgency. All stories fall away in the power of this knowing.

::

For Longing by John O’Donohue

Blessed be the longing that brought you here

And quickens your soul with wonder.

May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire

That disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.

May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease

To discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.

May the forms of your belonging–in love, creativity, and friendship–

Be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.

May the one you long for long for you.

May your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.

May a secret Providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.

May your mind inhabit your life with the sureness with which
your body inhabits the world.

May your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.

May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.

May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.

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A Thousand Ears

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Moon

“There’s a moon inside every human being.
Learn to be companions with it. Give

more of your life to this listening. As
brightness is to time, so you are to

the one who talks to the deep ear in
your chest. I should sell my tongue

and buy a thousand ears when that
one steps near and begins to speak.”

— Jalal al-Din Rumi

Image: Moon AttributionShare Alike Some rights reserved by WiderAngle on Flickr


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Fierce Times

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“There are many fierce moments in any one life span: times of turmoil, upheaval, challenge, and change. These fierce moments of grace are in many ways the most spiritually important moments of our lives.”
~ Adyashanti

Wood Line, a work of art by Andy Goldsworthy; photo by Julie Daley

Fierce times.

I’m personally in one of these fierce times.

I’ve left a relationship with a really lovely man. A man I love. I’ve left my home with him and moved into a new city, a city I’ve longed to live in for quite a while now.

Many have told me I’m courageous. I’m suppose there is some of that. And, to be honest, I simply could no longer stand the pain of avoiding what I knew was true in my heart.

It’s painful to avoid what gnaws at you during the night.

It’s painful to keep lying to yourself about yourself.

It’s painful to continue a relationship with someone you love, deeply love, when you get clear that it is no longer where you want to be.

Don’t get me wrong. Not all of me wanted to leave. A part of me was happy because I love him and I felt safe and secure with him. But that was only a part of it.

I also felt hemmed in by my own unwillingness to be true to myself…the real self.

And, I felt pain in my heart. The heart always knows.

This is where freedom really is…where there is no safety. I’m learning this. Not all of me believes it yet, but enough of me does to have brought me to this place.

The way does not reveal itself.

It doesn’t have to. It’s the way.

It doesn’t show up as a brightly lit, four-lane boulevard. Rather, it feels like the image above.

As I would lie awake at night, torn by this sense of needing to leave and a sweet love for the man lying next to me, I could feel the wild trees all around me, so thick I couldn’t see. It felt as if they were hiding the way, wrapping me in a darkness that felt frightening.

I was surrounded by the unknown, with just a small sliver of light and path ahead. Only a bit of the way was shown, and now, in hindsight, that bit was plenty. Always enough.

Somewhere in the midst of this wild forest of life is my wood line. The way is made from life itself, the wild forest giving over her bits of wood to be laid down end to end. A long curving line that snakes through the wildness of life.

Even the wild trees, the wild forest serves. I know without conflict, tension, friction, there can be no creativity. It’s in those sticky places where the desire for safety and the desire to be free rub up against each other. It is here where we can come to know the most humbling feeling of being the wild eye of infinite spirit living life through the limited reality of a human body.

As in the outer world, so in the inner world, so in the collective world.

This meandering path of Wood Line, forged by the death of cypress trees in a grove of eucalyptus, shows the way to a new life in a new world. The snake winds through me, too, beckoning me on to somewhere I can’t yet see, or that (as Marjory writes) “hasn’t been revealed to me yet.”

We are in an unshaped place.

This week I was on a call with Meg Wheatley. We spoke of her idea of hopelessness as a necessary way for these times.

In sitting with this sense, hopelessness is an invitation to let go of the ways I hold on to my old life. If this new life is to be truly new, letting go of hope means really letting go of my need for safety and security, of the ways I’ve known these things in the past. It means being with the shittiest of feelings that I have tried to avoid. It means beginning to trust in nothing but the ground that gives rise to existence itself.

And it is so in our collective world. The cypress trees of the old way, where greed, separation, and a wanton disregard for the earth were once cornerstones of how to be in the world, are taking their last gasps. As they die, the ground will again be visible.

“These fierce moments of grace are in many ways the most spiritually important moments of our lives.”

::

Wood Line by Andy Goldsworthy

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Solitary Impulse

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Creative Impulse.

This phrase kept running through my awareness as I danced on Sunday morning. Many of you know, since I write about it fairly frequently, that I dance every week, and have for over eight years. My practice is 5Rhythms, and on Sunday mornings 150 of us faithful practitioners come together to ‘Sweat Our Prayers’.

5Rhythms is a moving meditation where you dance the 5 rhythms that Gabrielle Roth discovered are at the heart of being human. In the practice, the mind is invited to let go as the body is invited to move on its own, without the normal constrictions the mind and thoughts place on it.

This past Sunday, I moved. I sweated. I let go. And in the space of these two hours of dance, this phrase kept repeating itself.

Creative Impulse.

Creative Impulse.

Impulse.

Impulse.

As I danced,

I was consciously aware of the impulse that came from somewhere deep within my body.

The impulse came up from the dark space within. When followed, the impulse guided me in a fluid movement, where there was no mover, just movement, just expression.

Deeply dropped in the body, I was aware of the impulse as a free and alive movement of energy, a never-ending stream of pulsation coming into being, then flowing out into expression and falling away into nothingness.

I was aware of the impulse…until I was more aware of my mind. Thinking. Judging. Comparing. Deciding it didn’t like the way I was moving. Deciding I looked clumsy. Deciding it didn’t like the music, or how others danced. Judging, comparing, deciding. Stopping the flow. Stumble. Stepping on my own toe. Ouch.

And what did I do then? I began to move again. Dropped back into the beat. Felt the impulse. Moved.

I’ve danced long enough to know this. But what was important this time, was a really bright awareness of this process of stopping, stumbling, being clumsy.

I came home and

considered what had happened and how it translates to life, because right now I’m stopping myself from allowing this impulse to move through me as it wishes. On the dance floor, I feel safe and comfortable to express, except for those moments when the thoughts come in.

In my life, I don’t feel that safety, even though, in reality, I am just as safe. I mean, who knows what people are thinking of me as I dance. Who knows what judgments are flying, what stories they make up about me? Who knows? I certainly don’t. But I feel free there, free to move, to listen, to express.

I know this creative impulse is always here. It’s always moving up and out of the deep darkness of the inner place. When I write I can feel it. And, when I write I can feel the sudden move of the mind behind the impulse that stops it.

As I am known to do,

I looked at the word impulse, because for me an impulse feels like it sounds. It is a pulse that moves out of me, one after another, but so closely together it is fluid.

As I looked up the word in the thesaurus, these other words showed up as synonyms:

Desire.

Drive.

Pulse.

Pulsation.

Thrust.

Beat.

Signal.

Stimulus.

Urge.

Force.

Pressure.

Impetus.

Whim.

Wish.

Itch.

Inclination.

Yen.

Bent.

Spur.

In simply reading them, I feel the impulse. Try it. Read them again, and feel how they feel in your body. Feel the words move through you. What do you discover?

For me, there is a resonance with the feeling of spring, of emergence, of a pushing up through soil, of a seed emerging into the light. There is also a sense of body function, inspiration, breath, pulse, desire…all pointing to a wide open sense of eroticism, of creation at its core giving birth in each moment to a new moment.

The practical side of this,

is seeing of how many ways I stop the flow with minuscule thoughts, tiny aberrations in the fluid movement of time and creation, where I attempt to stop what is happening, where I clog up the pipes, sit back and think rather than stay in the fluid motion of action that comes from within.

The flow stops when I don’t feel safe, for whatever reason. Sometimes, I’m still amazed at how important safety is for the ego, how it looks for that at all costs.

Not that we must be in motion all of the time.

In the dance, there are many moments where the impulse moves in tiny, tiny ways, even to a point of pure stillness, where what is moving is simply respiration, sweat dripping, maybe even a muscle trembling ever so slightly, a finger with a tender pulse, a ever-so-slight movement of the eye.

These moments happen all the time in life, where there is a pause, a breath, maybe even a languishing time of being still, silent, inward-turning.

This impulse is intelligent and wise.

It is the same impulse that moves through us all, yet how it expresses through each of us is different. And, how it expresses through women is different than men, for the female body is different than a man’s body.

This impulse knows something our minds can’t know. And right now, this impulse is guiding us to truthful action if we are willing to trust it to move through us.

I know this is happening in my life. I’m making choices that aren’t comfortable, aren’t cozy, aren’t safe. And in doing so, I find myself stumbling, hesitating, maybe even stepping on my own toes, missing the beat of the music, bumping into others I love and care about.

What is it I trust in

as I move out in directions I don’t know? There is a footing inside, a place that never changes, something I know is there. I don’t have a word for it, really, but Rilke does:

“But your solitude will be a support
and a home for you,
even in the midst of very
unfamiliar circumstances,
and from it you will find all your paths.”
My solitude. That place of aloneness. Only I can feel the impulse, can know its movement, can taste its insistence, can bow to its fortitude. Only I can give breath to it, can trust the pulse inherent in it, can allow it to inspire me forward.
As it is for you. Only you can know this in yourself. It is a place of great aloneness, yet we dance together all the same.

That’s okay. All that matters is that we keep dancing, keep breathing, keep moving our feet, letting the impulse move us, trusting that our own solitude is exactly the footing we are standing on, even when there is nothing underneath our feet.

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