I awoke this morning with the sunshine. Almost two hours before my alarm went off. It is clear to me what's happening - SPRING is happening! I am being called out of my dormancy by the powerful uprising energy of spring. I am waking to the sound of birds singing, and the energy of thaw and mud. I couldn't be more joyful about it, either! I have survived the darkest, bleakest winter of my life.
There were times during this darkness when the sorrow, despair, loss, and anxiety threatened to consume me. I have never been through a time when I felt closer to my own extinction. This has been a time of going through the fire, of having so much burned away. My ideas about life, about who I am, about my path, about other people, about what is right and wrong in this world, about meaning and purpose - all of these things were shredded, ripped away, burned up, and shed. But somehow I am emerging in a way that is NOT scarred, NOT jaded, NOT shut down, NOT bitter. I am emerging as from a cocoon, softer, more open, and with fewer answers than before.
The other day, between my two Thursday classes, I found some space in the sun to have my lunch. I squished my way through the mud and climbed up onto a rock in one of the gardens. The wind was a bit brisk, but the sun was wonderful, and after I finished eating, I sat there, just taking it in. The wind began to blow, and while my first response was to shiver (I was wearing a skirt, and was a bit cold) my second, and stronger, response was to listen. The wind doesn't have any sound of its own, it only makes a sound when it meets an object that resists its dance... I sat up taller, and listened more carefully, barely breathing, yearning for more understanding.
The sound of wind in tall, dry grass. The sound of wind around buildings. The sound of wind around my body. The sound of wind in the trees, in the dead leaves. Yes, it was true. Each time I heard the wind, it was only because the wind was meeting resistance. And of course, this is a truth that I know well, for it is only through the wind from within my body meeting the sharp silver plate of my flute that music is borne.
I became aware of the power of edges...it is in these places where things meet that the apparent universe is borne into sensory experience. Light falls upon an object and reflects - and we see. Wind meets objects as it flows, and we hear. The body meets an object, and we feel touch. As I sat there, I tuned into the edges, the meetings that were happening all around me, the resistance that occurred when two things meet. Woman walking in high heels. Clicking against the sidewalk. Earth and feet in a dance of resistance. Resist, surrender, resist, surrender - her footsteps were indeed a dance of moving into the Earth, and moving away from the Earth. Togetherness apartness togetherness apartness. And too, the wind dances in sound and in silence - swirling around form and waiting in stillness, swirling and waiting. Taste is a dance of the same longing - the satisfaction of good chocolate, and the absence of it. The fragrance of hyacinths in spring, entering my body, touching my heart, and drifting away as I exhale, as Spring exhales into the full glory of Summer. There is this dance of togetherness and apartness, of desire and satiation, of receiving and letting go, of touch and release. The very edge of these dual forces meet at an edge that the wind showed me - the edge where apparently separate forms meet and touch and resist and dance. The whole manifest world is making love with itself in every moment, dancing itself in embrace and surrender.
No wonder we humans love to make love so much...to dance with each other in the ways that the world dances with itself in each moment.
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