There’s a moment every once in a while when I’m driving a beautiful backroad alongside a winding river that I’ll round a corner that also has a slight descent and it feels, for just that moment, as though the road is disappearing beneath me. Or, there’s that moment, on the roads with rolling hills and though I’ve driven for miles and miles, sooometimes, right at the tip top of the hill my breath catches because it feels as though, in that split moment, the road will vanish. Has that happened to you? Those moments where we cannot see?

There’s nothing to do about it but remember how the road has always been there, caught us, before. Perhaps those quick silent prayers in our throat that rise then, that sound like, “Oh, God”…maybe they tune a string like that of a guitar in our heart-song, a little bit more just right, again.

Because with more and more such experiences we learn quiet and wait. To listen and look longer than we used to think we needed to, to trust how we won’t irrevocably fall but rather ride on.

If it were possible for me to put my brakes on in the moment to be sure the road was still there for me there are times in my life when I woulda. Wish I were kidding. Not unlike, a moment I’ll tell you all more about another time, but that I was in grave danger of drowning and it appeared to me the right “action” was to stop and think about what I should do, rather than swim. It actually took someone else watching me freeze in that moment yelling to me to swim in order to save my life.

I didn’t realize it as starkly until well after reflecting on surviving that situation how this is an issue for me.

Virginia Woolf once wrote, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

The Torah & Jesus famously give us this line a few times, “Man cannot live on bread alone.” I find, for one reason or another, I’ve often attempted doing all of those things, the things Virginia Woolf advised against attempting as well as Jesus. Sometimes the reason was outside of my power, other times very much within it.

Sometimes I’ve been upset about what was outside of my choice, done to me, stolen, and I’ve forgotten to notice how I steal from myself. “Stolen” or “snuck” time for my inner-life rather than tended to it day-by-day. My own special version of starvation.

“The hand-crafted life contains things that are fierce as well as beautiful.” -Clarissa Pinkola Estés

I like how she includes the fierce part. Why else would we neglect it? It takes bravery on so many fronts. Researcher and author Brené Brown shares in Atlas of the Heart, how Oprah Winfrey once wrote to her: “Do not think you can be brave with your life and your work and not disappoint anyone, it doesn’t work that way.”

It is a slow, sensual, work (as in actually using the full range of our senses that so many of us have been de-sensitized from) to weave upon the loom of us — our aliveness, our spirits, minds, bodies, hearts, souls.

It is a both lion-hearted and gently tender-hearted work.

When once one or more have somehow stolen some aspects of this from us, how often do we join in the un-natural disconnect and disarray and thievery? At first there must be a must that causes us to behave this way. For instance, it must have been safer. But then, in time, if we live from the near-drowning-like-situations at the grace of some amazing soul yelling at us to swim, to live… then maybe we’ll notice what author and teacher Michaela Boehm calls the opportunity of re-wilding, of coming finally and once again into the natural rhythms of who we have been created to be.

Maybe we’ll stay awhile, no more self-abandoning, no more agreement with the old stories of loss.

A little over a month ago I was walking through a lovingly landscaped space where almost upon every turn there was something new and interesting to see and notice, one detail either to the careful grooming of the land or some other attractive (even if at times odd or silly) adornment placed to bring beauty, delight, smiles and alighting of the eyes. We followed this outdoor path until it led into an actual door, the kind you normally see inside a house, but here it was, outside instead, leading us to a garden.

Is there a better metaphor for our inner life than a garden? But this garden brought my senses alive on a whole new level, old things used and made new, battered and rusted things intermingled with the stunning and enduring and ornate rod iron. Yet, these same items easily could have been found discarded alongside a beautiful back road following a winding river with a corner that also has a slight descent and I’d never notice as my breath caught and I wondered if the road would wind on beneath me… It was the garden that made those things most alluring, they were like little treasures collected from many travels that invited me to slow and look and breathe deeply at the tall summer stalks of flowers gently moving in the evening wind. It was walking slowing there that enabled the time to reach out my tingling fingers to brush by the flowers and emerald leaves a we passed by.

To follow when someone leads you through a garden doorway is a special gift. It can come through a stranger, a writer, a friend, a child, a teacher…

Ibn Battuta famously wrote, “Traveling, it leaves you speechless then turns you into a story teller.” 

Sometimes I have forgotten how pilgrimage is not only ascended to by plane or engaged by boat. There are deliciously sorrowful chapters of my life I treaded most preciously through the pages of my journal. Why would I call that sorrow delicious? Because it was only through my willingness to dine and love well through that sorrow that I found my way to the adjoining land called Joy.

Of course it did not feel that way then, nonetheless words and the excruciatingly slow (at times) work of articulating my experiences became as hewn stone footpaths through my own garden. I ache with gratefulness over the ability to name our experiences, to place word upon word, upon line upon line, to another soul who receives them and says, yes, I see. you. 

Even when at times that other soul-witness must be that new re-born us, our very selves no longer stealing from but nurturing us.

The piercing joy when it is a soul outside of us whether present today or who lives centuries before us is its own life-preserver in the drowning waters. Lao Tzu has been one such for me, “The journey of thousand miles begins with a single step” he said. These words have been like a rope thrown to me from a cliff crumbling beneath my feet. These are time-tested true words that I imagine will lead me and many others through many more a seemingly disappearing winding road and seasons to come.

Mei HaShiloach commented, “The Divine is revealed in the world through three dimensions: world, year, and soul.” He was speaking on Jacob’s dream of a ladder between heaven and earth (Genesis 28:12). I believe deeply in this, the way truth is revealed in layers and cycles and even in our very bodies.

The particular season of summer in the year, that those of us in the western hemisphere are in, reveals the elemental essence of fire, so. much. fire. and yet we are here in a wonderful garden, together, with a water source that flows beneath it all, flowers and gardeners alike, stolen from and re-wilding alike, frozen and learning how to melt into ease over curves and hills leaping with the hinds feet of deers alike!

Job, a man who suffered unimaginable loss and sorrow, in the Torah said, “Man born of woman is short of days, and fed with trouble. He blossoms like a flower…” And, of course, a flower is temporary, it “…withers, and vanishes, like a shadow.” (Job 14:1-2) Hardly comforting if we are still stealing from ourselves, still starving ourselves, and not dining on the food that meets needs beyond the way of bread. In this state, nothing is ever enough. Yet a well-fed, well-nurtured us is a creature as equally unimaginable as Job’s sorrow.

Us, well-learned in the art of saying no, and the art of going for walks in the evening Breath and in the fierceness of disappointing others and even ourselves with joy in the beauty of learning… this version of us, how ever often in each cycle of the year we are granted the grace to stand or lie down cradled within it, this is when our fingers will tingle as we brush by our fellow flower and foliage and our hearts will brim with gratitude at the unending, eternal, feast before us, no matter how the flowers fade as the fire burns.

We will understand the natural rhythms of who we were created to be, to go from seed to fruit to seed again.

Our heart-song’s strings will be tuned, we will be fierce and beautiful storytellers, we will traverse a thousand journeys and cherish every single step, the Divine will be revealed, and we will still vanish like a shadow. The sacred-body we have been given in all its wisdom will someday stop doing what it automatically, with no request, does for us each moment of each day. Today, whether with the fearfully imagined mid-no-road beneath us or amidst the real as death-potentially-by-drowning waters surrounding us, our valiant action could be to hear the call to swim—to live, to see, to speak, to think and hear and smell. How indomitable it is to be in our bodies, embodied, with breath and delight.

With you in the longing.

Love,

Raynna

 

If this writing resonated with you might like my book, The Love Writings: a ragamuffin’s letters about love