Encounters

Layers create the dynamics of our lives. What appears in front of us has a depth beyond and a shallowness before in an intersection of space and time. Nothing stands alone, even if it takes a solitary path. A simple melody is a sequence that allows each instant of life its moment and one moment would not be the same without the other. 

In the formation of the aesthetic of life, a rhythmic flow doesn't have to rhyme in order for it to follow the channel it moves along. Shifting ground, the layered forms don't stay in place for long. A new formation is created and develops so life can take place there. Just as the seasons change, so do lives and friendships that never held their place entirely forever. 

As I walk the world, the landscapes appear in front of me exposing my body to the growth that feeds my spirit and opens my consciousness to the experience of all that is interconnected and related. Flowers emerge where fungi once stood before. Leaves have fallen and gather where I stood years before. This isn't just my experience, but as time and seasons cycle, I notice that even in the similarity of life's patterns, there are still surprises of wonder. In the space of life we share, off and on the internet, there can be these layers, what is shared and what is a continuation of what has formed. As life keeps moving, so do the overlapping and colliding of reality. 

 

Good Morning

The Earth travels fast, and life with it, moves rapidly to make what has been our life. The day begins and before we can even wipe our eyes to greet the day it is time for the afternoon sun to fade into sky. If the morning is our first glimpse of the day, the hours can be long and measured, as though we have a blank canvas drawn out in the sky inviting us to share in creating something new and great. It is a chance to live with the uncertainty ahead.

New beginnings are always upon us, not just on January the 1st.  Even as new beginnings take hold of our lives, endings are wrapping up all we once knew in one moment of collision and transformation. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good night.  Do we have any greeting for those of us awake in those hours between dusk and dawn? Is it any wonder that as I let the my mind wander forward or backward, my life is still there wherever I left it? If I continued along with my life one experience followed by another, I'd be more understanding of the change that is always happening around me. Try as I may to keep up, I may as well live with what I can do with what is here. Just as light and shadow dance through the trees swaying in the wind, I inhale to take in what is fully present, the full reality of here and now. Its power comes from the interconnection of the elements of life's lyric echoed in a chorus of birdsong and commute. Repeat. This day is like yesterday, but it is today, creating its own verse in the midst of the metered pattern of life and death.

The path of life ahead is fraught with mystery. We may try to understand what will happen entirely with science, religion, philosophy, or an interpretation of history that is like today. Taking from these to form some of our picture of today,  the only sign of what we do tomorrow is what we do today. Life doesn't take place overnight; living does. Living while taking in the dynamic force of movement comforting us with the constant charge that flows freely as life again takes shape from what has been.

And so as I stood by the bedside of a dying man, massaging his shoulders, holding his hand, I looked into his face and saw his beauty. His life culminating in seasons of laughter and wonder, conversation and delight that formed him that day. These were the moments that I never saw take place, but was able to witness in the color in his cheeks and the vibrancy of character. In memory of our moments of listening, I hear the heartbeat of life creating the rhythm of the dancing that takes us all to experience.

          

    

These photos take me back to where I have been and saw that it was important to be where I was.  They are periods of standing in a place to witness the world around me which left me feeling my connection to it. Such places moved me with the rushing current of life has left me present to the unexpected that is always forming. I am ready to be a part of it. I am as ready as I'll ever be.

Cosmic Sunshine

Sunshine opens my eyes as view a sunrise. The daytime leaves me with a strikingly different view of the galaxy than the night where the stars and moon color the distances beyond comprehension. Stopped in my tracks by the fast movement in life, I don't have to stop it to enjoy it. I can ride with it, surfing time, as visions of color permeate my consciousness. There it is, the larger picture that is so vast that I am humbled by the changing scenes that flash by with the flicker of a wing and a leap of a trio of deer.

Can I open my senses in the same way that I open my eyes? To open the reality that for a second is before my eyes I need not capture it, but be with it, as it is here. In memory of all the that is now the past that allowed this one to be born, I live.

Where You Are

I think many of us long to have those experiences where our breath is taken from us and we are caught in inexpressible beauty. Sometimes it is these places where we experience the space between where we've been and where we're going for the first time. It is the honesty of these situations that is so striking in their beauty and fleeting nature. These times bring the present as it pulls at all of where we've been to become who we are now in a moment of intense transformation and surprise. Whether we have stopped in our very paths by a rising sun or have said goodbye to an old friend who we have only known during brief visits and heartfelt conversation. "See you next time." Tomorrow is never certain, however real today and yesterday have been.

It is in this attention that is the fixture of our present that we begin to really notice life that we may not have noticed before. We may notice something that is closer to us than ever before. The change that is happening swirls about in a mixture of emotion. How does this happen when our worlds collide with the changing forces that we can never stop?

In tenderness, our reality has shifted and our present is raw. We may be drawn to the edges beyond our will and encounter ourselves as we never have before. At the intersection between beginning and ending, there is that liminal middle space I wrote of earlier. A smile emerges when an experience we need to recognize is acknowledge, however sad and difficult the place we have is. This isn't a smile of joy, it's a smile of our own understanding that our lives matter. It is the expression of gratitude that this experience exists at all.

       

Dogwood and Trillium

   

With crickets chirping to one another through the trees and cornfields nearby, life is happening and changing in every moment. Where is the flower that was here yesterday? What will I look like tomorrow? How can I overcome this habit I've had for years? Does this moment mean anything on this lazy summer day?

If I strive to be present and mindful of the very minute I am in a certain location, I'll recognize that the passing days continue to form weeks that gradually multiply into months and years. What was once a stem, is now a bud, and what is a bud today will be a flower tomorrow.  If by taking this moment, and realizing it's potential, I can change or grow where I've seen something promising sprout out of the darkest ground. Overcoming this darkness takes the courage to break free from a familiar place and further reach unfamiliar terrain that can nourish and challenge the growth occurring.

How can I be still enough to enjoy and experience what I need to in this moment to take that next step? As reminded by a teacher this morning, I cannot leap forward without taking time to be in the place I am presently. Being mindful of the crickets chirping, the honest place I am in, will pull me back to all the swirling activity that has and will happen if only I am ready to take this opportunity to live and create the moment I'm living in.

Along The Journey There Are Glimpses of The Destination

In the soft glow of evening just before dusk life transitions out of the familiar that we have known for the changing hours of today into the vault of darkness that seems to hold more of the unknown. Fear for the future can sometimes suspend my eager anticipatory glances to tomorrow while keeping me expecting the same things I've already known and experienced. The sun has already begun to make its appearance somewhere in the East as I write this in the West. Tomorrow brings so much uncertainty because it has yet to be fully formed.

What about the answers to the questions that make up life's yearnings? What about the destination and end of the journey? Is that what I'm finding in each step I take? There is depth in not knowing. Do I choose to fear or do I choose to accept that I don't know?

In the sunset the day and the night meet for their final time for the day that is about to end. As the darkness arrives, the journey continues. There we find together with the light that the fullness around life is to be discovered as one brings meaning to the other.

The Sum of Everything

Many parts of life can seem like the movement of water as it cycles through different elevations and forms.  Some occasions can cascade like a waterfall with a rush of emotion through our hearts with surprising motions that make us experience wonder and excitement either along flowing streams and collected pools or slow drops change surroundings  that comes with time.  With water rushing down our faces, covering us with grief supplanting the future for the present that we need to experience in order to find our way through a storm with acceptance of the changes of the day. With so much change, the present never stays for eternity. What's the point if whatever we do and live through doesn't last?

There are shifts and changes every day that are almost inevitable take the future by the hand if to say welcome, you were coming, you are now here,  and now it is time to find what you mean to us. I write as if this is directed to myself and an other, person or group. When I write words about a collective, "we" and "our" or "us," I mean that I've experienced them and I think that you in reading this may know and recognize these feelings as well. I want to speak of us as experiencing them all together either through storytelling or actual experiences that can be remembered and recalled,  even if I have never met you or experienced your story in your way. Even in reading and writing, one word is read before the next one is found in completing a sentence or paragraph or essay. Life is always moving, even when we seem to be standing still.

The Earth revolves on it's axis bringing light into it's atmosphere from the sun and the moon that are our guides in this place in the solar system we live in. We live our lives amongst all the other peoples that are currently in this place in time with us. Our friends, family, neighbors, gather and live as we together find what we're doing for tomorrow with what we have had yesterday and today. There are interactions in this light, in this day or night that we have had that have brought us here. Moments that we cherish and hold dear to our hearts through photographs, songs, and remembrances become something more, they become our life.

We grow into our lives one day at a time. We make it matter through what we do with one another and on our own. As nothing stays the same, nothing changes if we don't act as we are able. Two sisters preparing a meal from eggs laid by the chickens I tended with them, friends dancing to music that sings in their soul and flies through the years to connect generations, neighbors gather to remember and honor one of their own at a funeral that bridges the past to the future with the present. How we share what has been brought to us, like a tree growing from each day through each hardship and golden peak of sunlight, is how we live. It is finally, not what seems to end so soon that matters, but the sum of everything that we make together and on our own in a discovery of who we are.

Finding Hope

In a journey of life where days are sometimes filled up with exhausted hope and unanswered questions it often becomes harder to look forward to any of the days ahead or smile within the time we are living, the present. Despair seems to build in the midst of doubt and hurt breaks along fault lines in our fractured hearts. These seeds of discouragement can be watered by tears of sadness, resentment, regret and are important feelings in acknowledging the challenges we face and know are real. Life can be a burden where so much sorrow can seem impossible to overcome. If we indeed are the commanders of our fate, there is much to see in a full picture of reality that is really life.

What can come from sorrow that arises from within our souls? Can hope and love emerge from the pain breaking along the fault lines within our hearts? Even though these moments of pain shall pass away, the scars in our hearts and psyches can rest with us for longer. When we're walking along through these stretches of road accompanied by emptiness and grief the days seem to have lost their meaning.

Somehow the resilience needed to return to hope isn't that far away. Hope in the depths of doubt, in the woes of fearfulness, in the fear of helplessness. It can grow as we extend our hands in openness to our own lives, to each other. It is surprising how vulnerability takes us from our fear and towards community. Despair cannot be overcome at once, but as the sun shines, a flower blooms, as a rain drop falls, a rainbow arcs across the sky. Appearing out of nowhere, hope emerges, like flight, sudden and lasting. A moment becoming eternity. The light shines as time moves our feelings to understanding that together as a song breaks the silence and silence captures our fears in an encompassing journey of weaving the threads of heartbreak and tenderness together.

Transforming Moments Together

A transformative moment is not always created intentionally. Many of these transcend words in the moment they are experienced. Living within the power of these experiences sometimes takes us away from the control that is our sense of place in life. Such a sense of control leaves us with stability over our choices and our feelings. However when there is a change in this reality; be it something comforting in our lives that is lost or something new and less familiar, we can either feel the experience or run from it. And sometimes these changes can change how we think and feel about life and can influence what we do purposefully create.

For me, these experiences transform my understanding of life. These experiences doesn't necessarily have to be detrimental in order to provoke change or new understanding. Sometimes they can be held in place while the emotions of the moment run deep and the thoughts and inextricable connection of the universe brings you closer to the whole reality of the wonders of life.

Grasping onto to our realities can help us feel how shifting forces and experiences are a part of our own. When I feel this kind of reality, that of many others' intersecting with my own, I know how small I am, yet how integral this feeling is to my humanity. These kinds of experiences are usually brief, yet last in my heart a lifetime.

I lived on Long Island when the World Trade Center towers were attacked in New York City on September 11, 2001. I wasn't in the city to witness the horror, but I felt the immediate reverberations of fear and concern echo across people everywhere around me. I was aware that many competing forces demanded for the attention of the nation as the area around New York became numb with shock and later changed by grief and outrage. I had seen the World Trade Center towers in person and had walked in the shadow of their magnificent height. To hear of their destruction and the death of many lives continued to alter my understanding of our multiple, complex civilizations that exist and interact across our daily lives and histories. 

As the decade changed course from this pivotal day, so did I. I ended up moving away from the area that was once home and become a part of a new landscape. Western New York was culturally and socially different from the familiar on Long Island. And then almost a decade later, I returned to Long Island and New York City for a weekend. During one stretch of time, I wound up being intrigued by the reality that I hadn't been to downtown Manhattan since the attacks on September 11th. In seeing the setting sun fill the gaping hole that once held the site of many interactions that shaped lives around the world, I stood silent. Changed. The words that could have escaped my mouth were removed by the space of time. 

How interconnected we really are. How these realities of wonder, shock, memory, transformed my sensitivities and thoughts of each person. How fragile we are. How our connections can strengthen through understanding. May this understanding be one where we see how each difference is also our similarity, how each uniqueness also brings together our whole world. May this oneness be unifying, not in fear, but in harmony. Let us know that in loss, we remember how this moment was formed from our connected beings and in that new moment may we stand with courage in remembrance and hope for our moments in this shared world.

Ground Zero in Downtown Manhattan - 2009

Special Olympics statue at the State University of New York College at Brockport

Unspoken Realities

What is unspoken is not necessarily something unheard. What we feel and discover during an interaction or moment with ourselves or with others can still reach through to the heart as it beats out a cadence of what we experience. It then later remains imbedded in memory and feeling when we live and remember. These unspoken realities bring us to deeper places of our selves, of our relationships, connections, and places. What we live and feel in a moment can stay with us a lifetime.

This isn't something that is always good or bad. It is what we make of it now and forever. As meaning and feeling emerge or intersect in time these experiences shape us. These times that are unspoken because they are too deep for words are spoken through expressions and the feelings that fill our eyes. This is how we are changed by our feelings as they fill in the blanks where there is an absence of words.

 First impressions, fleeting glimpses of nature's beauty, nostalgia, evocative creativity, all create these times where we feel with our senses before we feel our souls turning to receive them. What I feel when I smell a fresh pine tree as I walk beneath the boughs covered in sunlight. How the cool air of a summer breeze ventilating a car on a drive along city streets.  Hearing the  echoes across a great hall now empty where memory fills in the people that once danced there.

There are conversations we wish we could return to, people and events that have made us so alive in who we are that we couldn't enjoy life any more fully, and places that trouble us and discourage spirits, anger us at what has been or what could have been. Transformation occurs in these times. Change does happen whether or not we accept it or even notice it.

It has been said that nothing lasts. Nothing lasts except the memories and life that has already been. What is before us now in fondness when we catch a friend's gaze, smile at someone tapping a moment's potential, or briskly walking through daylight that illuminates our way forward. These are the realities where the senses we feel now will guide us back to these moments when we stop to feel them.

Immerse Yourself In Winter

The weather has become cold, the days have become shorter, and everything familiar about winter in the Northeastern United States is here. The familiar grey skies overcast with few breaks in the perpetual ceiling of clouds keep us scurrying around as though hurrying will make the sun shine. Where the depths of winter loom with the joy of holiday song and light behind, we groan and moan, and can't wait for the first crocus to bloom in hole left by the melting snow.

 It is a new year and the first full month of Winter. It is a season where it is easy to hole up and grab our video games, read our books, and watch our movies in an effort to hibernate. For some of us needing warmer temperatures, we need to find any way we can to stay warm. So where do we live in the season where everything seems dreary and ghastly grey?

 In recent posts written about community, the barefoot wonder of community with other people can sometimes bring a mix of obnoxious cacophony and good humor. We cannot live completely alone, but we can take in this cold weather and feel it surround us while we take some time out for solitude to listen. The sounds of rain drops melting snow during a warm spell. The sound of a radiator hissing as it warms us as we watch the spaces around us from inside. To listen and connect to all that is happening even in the midst of silence.

Somehow the stillness takes more time to notice than the busy rush of daily life. It is in its vast presence that nature emerges taking our breath, our life, and forming all of winter with the breath of all living beings. The conifers revel in their chance to show off their needles as people everywhere notice their wintry white covering. Colors are seen as birds that stayed home take flight and fill their air with sounds of their chirping. Stop and feel the presence of the seasonal temperatures grip your skin, expand your soul, and comfort your sense of living. It is as invigorating as it is peaceful. Let the newness of feeling become familiar so that the familiarity can let you engage it with barefoot wonder.*

* Just don't wander into the snow barefoot without a way to warm up shortly afterwards. Hypothermia and frostbite are no way to enjoy the wintry climate.