As we wander through a new day, there is always the possibility that the visitor of melancholy may join us, coloring our experience, infusing the interactional field with a longing, a broken-openness, just feeling raw about the whole thing. About this precious, devastatingly, relentlessly alive human experience.
Not the mind’s version of sadness where we enact the primordial trance that something is missing, that we’re not okay as we are, that we must become something new or someone different. Instead, it is an emissary of the tender, a reflection of how open it truly is here and how it will never really turn out the way we thought.
Inside this body is the sun and the moon, the stars, the oceans, and the entirety of the seen and unseen places. Joy is here, as is loneliness, confusion, heartbreak, and bliss – each a unique portal through which to enter into intimacy with all things.
The dusting of snow in the morning hills, the birdsong from beyond, the orange inside the orange of the leaf, the yellowed place just outside my door.
No longer having a bias for union over separation – or for oneness over multiplicity – free to fully engage here and to no longer postpone the offering that you are. Committed to whatever appears, ready to hold and transmute it for the benefit of self and other. In awe at the spirit buried inside matter and the richness of the sensual world.
From inside the center, it is no longer possible to weave the narrative that the broken, the vulnerable, and the melancholic are obstacles on the path. Rather, they are the path itself, illumined from within by pure awareness. While at times this awareness may appear empty and of the void, it is filled with outrageous qualities of luminosity, warmth, and compassion.
This is what you are.
Photo outside in the park where I am often found napping and dreaming and wandering…
My latest book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available
The next book, The Unfolding Heart, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come
The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster
