From the perspective of exhaustion and the longing for rest, it is compassionate to seek relief from the uncertainty, and to replace the groundlessness with something more stable. Honor the call to safe passage and something to hold onto. It is an act of kindness to practice self-care, to weave a new story, and to soothe an overstimulated nervous system.
From the perspective of open awareness, groundlessness and aliveness are one. There is nothing to hold onto, nothing to shift, and nothing to transform. There is no new person to become, no healing which must occur before you can fully show up and participate here. Your life is not a project to be solved, but a mystery coming into being.
While the mind may spin in the attempt to resolve the conundrum, it is pure as it is, of the nature of wisdom, and has been placed inside a temple within you. The mystery is not meant to be resolved, only entered more deeply into. Inside the temple is a primordial sort of rest, which is discovered not through the answering of questions, but by way of intimacy with the contradictions.
As Rilke reminds us, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Though the activity of love is infinitely tender and holding, in its essence it is everything. It is devastating as it is the end of one world, glorious as it is the beginning of another.
Art credit: “Feeling free” by Andycap
My next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and
The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and
The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
