15 April 2016

Instead of being in the world, let the world dwell in you.  Open yourself up to it all.  You won’t loose yourself.  You will find you are big enough, bigger than you ever imagined.  ~yoga nidra

My nephew, a student of Eastern Philosophy, introduced me recently to a Daoist concept he translated as Wa/onder, a joining of the words ‘wander’ and ‘wonder’.  For me, the term provides a charming image of this concept of life as a conversation, an interactive process of inquiry and exploration.  A process in which it seems to me we affect the reality we experience by shaping the filters through which we perceive our lives.  And, also, I think, we shape some of what comes to us in utterly mysterious ways.

Wandering through life’s territory can be intimate and exciting, or foreign and frightening.  Shutting down, wanting the answer now, defending how I think things should be are all familiar strategies for coping with difficult stretches.  But what I really want is to stay fresh with life, awake to interpretations or relevance unnoticed before.

It is not required that we know it all.  It is not required that we do it all alone, strong, perfect and apparently effortlessly.  I have banged my head into the walls of these notions for years because they had such a pervasive hold on me.  It is impossible to care and to grow without stumbling and falling, hurting and being hurt.  Life is big, messy, difficult right alongside being dear, glorious and magical.

Having a conversation with life, asking questions that aim toward what I value, is helping me learn to trust the many facets of life.  It is like creating any relationship:  A way to receive another and offer who I am.  To appreciate the time together.  To ask for help.  And trust that there is a hand held out somewhere if I wander and wonder my way toward it.

 

We shape ourselves                                                                                                                            to fit this world                                                                                                                                   and by the world                                                                                                                                are shaped again.

The visible and the invisible                                                                                                   working together                                                                                                                                  in common cause,                                                                                                                                  to produce the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way the invisible air traveled at speed                                                    round a shaped wing                                                                                                                        easily                                                                                                                                      holds our weight….

…So may we, in this life                                                                                                               trust                                                                                                                                                to those elements                                                                                                                                    we have yet to see                                                                                                                                 or imagine,

And find the true                                                                                                                     shape of our own self,                                                                                                                            by forming it well                                                                                                                                        to the great                                                                                                                                   intangibles about us.                                                                     ~David Whyte, from the poem Working Together