26 February 2016

The most exciting discoveries happen at the frontiers.  When you come to know something new, you come closer to yourself and to the world.  Discovery enlarges and refines your sensibility.  When you discover something, you transfigure some of the forsakenness of the world.  ~John O’Donohue

I’ve been wishing I’d titled this week’s post ‘Open Sesame’.  Since writing it, I’ve felt buried, fretting over work and people, behind on everything, making crummy choices and loosing sleep over all of the above.  But, in the midst of this, there have been these little magical moments.  Tiny moments when I remembered to open up…and suddenly everything expanded.

A portal swung open as surely as if I’d uttered a magic chant.  Open Sesame.

My iPhone screen is a luminous image of a deep, dusky blue sky with sparkly stars and billowy silver clouds that I adore.  That image gets covered over with apps but all I need to do is swipe away those preoccupations, and that luminous sky is right there, waiting.

Life is like that, too.  When I’m willing to see things differently, the world becomes different.  Not the circumstances perhaps, but how I view them can alter how I show up and what I have to offer when I arrive.  Sliding aside my thoughts, not because they are wrong or unimportant, but because I’ve realized they are not the whole of everything, I cross into receiving a bigger, fuller picture.

Standing in that portal, my worries don’t evaporate, but they find their place, or not, within the expansive reality of life on a planet where hard, inert seeds know when to push up from the dark toward a different strata, where crawly caterpillars descend into stillness and emerge as winged creatures, where something as ethereal as love delivers palpable strength.

Here, in this space, is the knowledge that we are all part of the mysterious workings of a breathtaking world.

I’ve shared several of Jena Schwartz’s poems because I love her words and her wisdom, and how cleanly and accessibly she lays them both out.  Reading her post, The Skin I’m In, this week was one of my magic moments.