I’ve been thinking about what to write this morning since yesterday, and perhaps the day before, because the truth of the matter is, I’m feeling a little porous.
Like the spaces in between the edges of my skin have opened just enough for the world to creep in and the parts of me that are meant to be free and spacious are now heavy. A sodden towel needing to be wrung out placed in the full sun. This is my body for today.
What is the approach- to writing, to creating, to doing anything at all- when you want to close the window instead of fling them open, that instead of galloping you wish to crawl?
We accept this is the start point and begin.
We ride shotgun with the sadness or the heaviness or the anxiety or the fear, and we do not make requests of them at any point to disappear. We befriend them. Love on them. Make them hot chocolate. Treat them with care.
They are surprised at this approach and begin to soften their hard edges. We discover that they are searching for friendship as much as the next person (if we can be so audacious to presume an emotion is a person), and it’s only when we treat them kindly that we can really understand what they wanted in the first place.
We make it our mission to point out all the beauty, because beauty is a necessary thing. After all, if we are heavy with anything it is because we do not understand how others are missing all the beauty, so we best be making sure we are not missing it ourselves.
Speaking of which:
This weekend, I saw a Pīpipi, a brown creeper, for the very first time. Can you imagine? These adult eyes, in all their years of seeing, having never seen such a thing before. I was walking with a bird expert, and they pointed them out in amongst the trees, and I was wondrous like a child, enthusiastic and asking all the questions.
This is the way I think, through all the heaviness:
We take our soggy towel bodies, bundling everything they are holding and we tell them simply:
Just pay attention and keep looking in the trees.
This is the way to keep on going.
My drawing of the Pīpipi.