 |
| February into March 2004 February 2004 Stepping into the shower today, I’m startled to see the first peach blossoms on the ancient, gnarled and very termite-eaten tree outside my window. Just three or four days ago there weren’t even any ripe buds. Yet, here she is magically and suddenly beginning to flower lavishly. As I wander toward the cottage from my sleeping tent each morning, I pass my recently crewcut rose bushes. The tender nubbins of pale red new shoots have grown measurably overnight. Day by day the little sprouts lengthen and then begin to differentiate into the tiniest of new red leaves on slender pale green and rose-colored "new wood." New green emerges on the similarly crewcut hanging fuschia and the recently shorn clockvine. The first daffodil opens outside my desk window. A brave and sprightly pioneer! And, after this week’s new rains, the frog populations on the property and on the trails have exploded with their inimitable cacophony. Spring is unfurling herself! I am knee-deep in ripening citrus: pink and white grapefruit, tangelos, navels, mandarins, blood oranges, Meyer lemons and Mexican limes. The fruits this year are much smaller in size than I remember but, oh, their tangy sweetness is more sublime than ever! I eat my way through the varieties each day as I wander about picking and packing boxes to send to friends in other climates. I am, everyday, immensely grateful for all the gifts here in this Eden. Yet, it takes the open-mouthed awe of a visitor from some city or town coming by to remind me just how unusual it is to live amid such year round juicy abundance. I love handing bags and clippers to "town/city folk" and giving them permission to be incredibly greedy! Like drunks on a spree, they go wildly through the trees laughing with such childlike glee–picking, picking, picking! In the two weeks since finishing all my year/end-year beginning rituals and processes, I’ve been gathering my energies for two upcoming brief trips to the East Coast. Part of that involves hoarding a store of quiet, drifting time before I leave. For the rest I’m consumed with gathering what I’ll need to take with me. Making packing lists, trying on clothes. Putting together my daily doses of herbs and supplements, my special foods, things to read and sacred space things I need both for the travel time and for my before-bedtime rituals. It seems to take up a lot of "space," all this preparing. I am not low maintenance! What always seems so odd about it all is that–at home–none of this usually involves any conscious attention. Everything I might need is always here at hand. There’s no need to think about what I might feel like wearing/eating/reading several days from now. Traveling involves today’s me in trying to anticipate what next Sunday’s me might need or want. How can I really know that? I haven’t yet reached an inner place that might allow me to travel really lightly. It would require a deep trust that what I might need or want at any moment in my travels would be easily available when and where I’d need it to be. I have that kind of complete trust in my emotional, spiritual and everyday physical life. Yet, when I’m going away from home, my trust in having my physical needs "taken care of" by Spirit seems quite minimal, sigh! Thus my endless and sometimes exhausting round of attempts at far-seeing and planning for all imaginable whims. Not any wonder that I’m so little interested in leaving home at this season of my journeying! Nor that my happiest traveling days were when I lived in my van, with everything I might ever need or want always with me! March 2004 I am blissfully home again after all my travels! A long day and a half of unpacking, laundry, catching up with paperwork, phone/email messages, seeing to the gardens, sharing extra loves with Ms. Pretty is what it takes to both psychically and physically return to/reclaim my precious home space. While I was away spring has come almost to full blossom in my gardens: daffodils, freesias, asparaxis, carpets of wild nasturtium, the roses in full leaf and even (at night, when the sun isn’t burning off the oils) the beginnings of the intoxicating scent of orange blossoms. Crickets back in legions. The bird population increased enough to empty the feeders noticeably more quickly now than just two weeks ago. And, the days have turned quite hot! I come back from 30 degrees and snow showers in Boston to a week of Ojai temperatures that are in the 80’s! I come home tired more from the traveling than from the "full-on" being with people. This is a newness for me. Something that has come just in the past few trips this and last year. I seem so much more able to be completely surrendered into the moment of being with others, to be letting go of the being alone spaces. I am more able than ever to be in the middle of the flow, the intensity, the different ways of living. Without any part of me comparing it to or yearning for my other life at home. As soon as I leave home and shift into the between-place of travel to another time zone, I reset my travel clock to the new time. And, I make no translations back to the home time. Somehow (at least with just a 3 hour time difference with which to contend) I’ve always believed this shift to be the reason I’m never jet-lagged traveling in either direction. The change in my capacity to make the emotional reality shift to whatever reality I find myself in seems to have a similar kind of effect: no emotional-lag to deal with. I’ve always had what seemed to me an enormous capacity to blend chameleon-like into whatever the emotional environment in which I might find myself. In earlier, more fraught seasons of my journey, I saw that capacity as a damage in me. I felt as though I had no solid, real self to call "me." Only, instead, this ever-changeable persona. Now, my experience is quite different. There IS a solid, defined and fully developed me that goes everywhere with me, in undiminished form. And, according to the emotional/physical environment in which I find myself, certain parts are more pronounced, more "figure." The less relevant or fitting-in parts become more background until or unless some opportunity for their expression emerges. The more solidly I’ve come into my full self, the less distressed I am when no such opportunities arise. And, the less my need to be internally reminding myself of all of who else I also am. This not needing to remind myself is the parallel to not reminding myself what time it "really" is in my home place. It feels amazingly freeing, this surrendering into just what is so, just what of me is relevant in the just where I find myself to be. The ongoing, ever-expanding practice of surrendering into just what is so in the moment is an extraordinary gift in almost any circumstance. It allowed me to be perfectly fine and unruffled in the midst of having my 1:55 P.M. flight delayed first one, then two, then four hours before it was finally just cancelled! I took my hotel and food chits, went off to the Airport Hilton. There I soaked in a delicious bath, did "morning ablutions," ate my own brought-from-home food, used my food chit to replace my now-depleted bottled water supply and then returned to meet and sleep on my now "red-eye" flight leaving at 10:20 P.M. that night. Sleeping on the plane instead of at my folks house (I would have arrived there at midnight on my original itinerary) left me with the same amount of waking time I would have had with them anyway! Having all my food, toiletries and amusements in my carry-on of course made it all much easier than it might have been otherwise. (There’s something to be said after all for my "high-maintenance" pre-travel preparations!) I realize that, these days, when I go "out-in-the-world" I go without any expectation that things will go easily or well. I certainly want and would like them to, but that’s not the same as expecting that they will. When messes happen, I more easily able to yield, surrendering into what’s unfolding, waiting to see where it’s all leading. Of course, believing that Spirit has a hand in all of it-even the seeming messes-helps enormously! And, almost always it does turn out that there’s some magic to be noticed in it. By arriving at my parents at 7:00 A.M., I got to start my visit with three hours just with my dad. A very different, incredibly sweet entry compared to the usual one that includes my step-mom in a threesome in which my less verbal dad gets over-talked! So, here I sit back at home with nothing on my plate but the long, slow, unhurried process of hand coloring 18,000 fresh-from-the-printer Rememberings and Celebrations cards. A gentle kind of curious readiness pervades my being. Everything feels especially vivid just now. I sit in my meditation garden drinking morning tea amazed by the peace, the vibrant, endless shades of new and old green, the weaving of bird song and the sounds of their wings. Everything feels newly washed, sparkling. And inside my whole being there is the same freshness, newness, vibrancy. I feel so present, so full of just this moment, so available to whatever may be coming. To visit the Bulletin Board Archive Table of Contents Site Directory (for non-frames viewing)
* |
