In Front Of Our Eyes

After wandering in this year for awhile, I've noticed that the calendar year is about to cycle back to it's beginning. What was once starting is now ending, at least that's what it seems. With the paradox of beginnings and endings, there is always an unknown. As if to chart the future, I chronicle the past in hope of understanding where I as a person and we as a species have been. I have written much about the happenings that bring me out of the past and into the future. What stands before me is the present.

How should I create a present out of all the media that arrive at my feet from the past. This "baggage" might actually be a toolbox or backpack of knowledge. In front of my eyes is the view in any direction I choose to look. There is a way that I choose to live, with the perspective I have gained from sharing and being shared with, that creates a life. There is so much creativity that abounds in front of my eyes and into my ears. As I receive, so I also give.

To participate in this cycle is to notice what I have and to know the impact of having it. To speak broadly, to have friendship is to have someone in my life in whom I can have the joy of sharing interests with. The more it is developed, the more the friendship may acquire a greater connection from deepening a bond with experiencing life together.

There is no concrete way this can be done, except by beginning here-wherever here is for you. We will never experience something exactly as someone else does. We can only taste and know that what we experience should be out of our hopes, our yearnings, out of what we find good - and begin to engage in making this thing called a future, in remembering the past with the dignity of all its humanity and worldliness and to continue the journey.

Sunshine

The sun shines all over this planet leaving energy for plants to grow and light to illuminate our lives. For an emergence of sunshine is a creative force, cast on the snow and reflected in a glistening light and as rays like fingers reach through the clouds to the terrain of the Earth. It finds its opening in the crags and fissures along the surface of life as a guiding beacon into understanding warmth.

Our eyes open to the first light and close when our body calls upon us for a time of rest and renewal. As the sunshine bursts across the scenes of our lives there is the space to discover what is here in our lives, what is deepened and expanded in every moment. In recent days, I have felt the sunshine of new opportunities in the lives of friends who have danced into the dawn. I feel the gaiety of all we gather in the stories of our days. The stories that begin to glow with the happiness that surprises us as sunshine glows from the places that were once dark.

This is the sharing of sunshine. A dance with a dear friend, a smile with a new one, an understanding nod in an empathetic ear. As we illuminate life with the truth of who we are, we can bear the anxieties and fears that carry our hearts into realms of deepest need. As we hear how we're not alone, as we gather ourselves to trust life at its core, we can begin to soar together.

           

Reaching For Freedom

In the depth of our hearts there lies a place where we can live and find the freedom in that fullest space. It is a space of liberating expressiveness that brings out the fears and questions that plague one's mind with doubt. As a way to take flight, there must be the willingness to abandon that which others expect us to be and do. To live from our lives, we stand up in our experience and step into that place of unrelenting opportunity.

These places allow an intimate connection with life in the most powerful of ways. We evoke the essence of our beings as we honor our own paths with honesty and are changed when we experience the intersection of these places of love, discovery, understanding, openness, and transformation. The challenge within comes from wrestling with the forces that try to make our dynamic lives for us. No one can tell us what to experience when we love. We can only change when we are ready.

So as we venture into life, we find these experiences that free our inhibitions and allow for something almost divine to emerge. What does it take to fully liberate a soul for a moment alone if not a life time as well? To be free from the chains of life? When these freedoms are kept in bondage by discrimination, oppression, trauma, misunderstanding, and fear, a full life cannot be lived. Perhaps a lifetime of moments of walking through the gentle moments of sunshine and bitter winds, amidst the shade of a tree that grew alongside the roads that brought us new and old memories together, and among the breaths that we felt our freedom as a means to overcome our collective fears and struggles.

To be free, we have to reach into ourselves and extend into the heights of our dreams and goals, affirm the shadows standing beside us and grow tall together. To be free, we still will live with consequences and the experience of pain, but it is different when the pain is understood as it is overcome with love and compassion, each day, each life at a time.

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

Catching A Meteor Though It Falls

As the days pass, the years somehow do, as well. I began writing this blog in part to remember that the presence of each moment in our lives can have the potential to help life become something beautiful and real. This experience can happen anywhere with anything, and is often unplanned and surprising, but also lasting and memorable. Then time doesn't have to go so fast, it can go at the pace of the moment as we live and breathe and take it all in and be alive in its memory after these times have long ended and are returned to in photographs and reminiscences. 

Have you ever waited for something for only minutes or seconds? The time seemed to go slower than when you were living every moment as we looked forward to the rush of life continuing and building with fun and excitement. What about the seconds that you feel something wonderful come over your senses? The moment that we feel that contentment or that understanding that even the imperfection of life somehow settles with the laughter and peace is the time when our life comes together and eases our heart.

Holidays do this for many of us. They serve as reminders while the traditions we carry out on these special days give significance to our lives and memory. The rhythms of daily living can be monotonous and routine without much wonder and excitement. As mundane as things can be, stunning surprises can occur if we are paying attention in the present. A meteor falling only lasts an instant, a beginning of something happens only once, and even as life moments seem to occur in patterns, every day can have a flash of memory and wonder.

At a recital I attended recently, a violin and cello duo reached and soared into the colorful art in the windows and walls illustrating a portrait of the past to present listeners that were able to feel the movement of emotion and life expressed in music. The different sounds harmonized like textures of a landscape bringing me to distant lands and triggered feelings I had never felt. Such an experience would be temporary even though it would always be with me in memory. It also becomes lasting as the quilt of moments grows and colors the soul.    

A Symphony of Summer

"There is a song, a song without a word,
whispered the wind and I overheard.
It sings in summer showers and the music of the rain,
falling on the growing grain,

There is a song, a song without a word
Whispered the sea and I overheard.
It burbles in the brooks and steams and rivers running clear,
If you listen you can hear...

Listen! you can hear it
Listen! you can hear it
In the echoes of the endless ocean swell.

Treat the earth well..."
- Song of the Earth ~ Tom Chapin


In the morning of a new summer day, a fresh beginning of birdsong and glows of sunshine arrives.  It's a creation of the bursting forth of goldfinches and the buzz of honeybees collecting pollen. In each Summer day the essence of life created in Spring bursts into a blaze of life in the motion of synergy, in the strum of a guitar being played on a front porch as the travelers pedal and whirr past on bicycles, and the fragrant combination of barbecues, sweat, grass clippings, rain, and flower gardens becomes a collage of the senses.

The passage of time seems slower. It's been said to be lazier, but it's a time to let the heartbeat of humanity reverberate in our movement along the way. In a summer of dry weather in the United States, it is a time to hear things differently, to hear the mourning doves crying as the day becomes the cool blue night and to awake and paddle out onto the water and see ducks feasting together just after dawn. It is here we find the uniqueness of each day that forms each year and each life.

The spirit of togetherness surrounds us in nature and neighborhoods. In a field of wildflowers and shrubs I passed on a bike ride recently, a cloud of goldfinches and starlings begin chirping flying over the flowers and filling into the sky with color. Their songs distinctly unique, even in unison, can give us a sense of community with nature, with those we love, with the places we live.

We hear the passage of the trains as they roll through our communities and see the jet streams that connect us all through the skies. These sounds, echo with our heartbeat as we move with being. The being that can be felt with our bare feet, the untapped experience that ultimately adds a picture or aroma to our existences, to our lives. The movements of this symphony are found in the screaming of young children flying on swings as they take off and feel the exhilaration of the moment, the fiddles singing into the night as dancers and old friends gather to feel their souls together, the quiet melody of a choir singing the memory of those lives who have been a part of ours but are now memory, and the walks with loved ones where we cherish what is held with dear trust and grown in the minutes of laughter and wonder.

As the last full month of summer draws to an end, its sunset is not the foreshadowing of nightfall, but the transition into Autumn. The fall leaves and period of change, of settling, and final foraging of the summer's warmth before we bring out the blankets and hooded sweatshirts. Summer will be missed, but the symphony continues and evolves as new instruments join the flock to continue each measure in the harmonies of the harvest.

A New Day, A New Tomorrow

This morning while working my shift as a caregiver at hospice, I stood near the bedside of one of our residents while she passed away. To me, death is a very mysterious thing that connects us to all that is living on this planet while bringing us in more of an awareness of our humanity. The peacefulness of this passing combined with the hopeful and mournful expressions of grief and transition in the life of our resident's family gave me a deeper look at the experiences we feel from the overwhelming emotions of life's permanent changes.  Rains can fall for a long time, but when they clear leaving a misty cloud or rainbow so that the sun can open the heavens to the clear skies above, they show the hope that life can continue to grow and emerge after the water has nourished and strengthened our souls.

Our lives are never just one experience after another. One forms while another one is still continuing to shape our life. It's almost as if the ambiguity that allows us to feel hope at the same time we feel fear is the antidote to creativity that may be stunted by boredom. It creates a greater sense of humanity as the complex assortment of our sensory experiences is our entryway to being our truest self.  It changes everything as the light of day becomes the sunset that bridges the gap between day and night in our temporary moments.

As time comes and goes, moments are found to be measured in what we feel, what we live through, and what we remember.  It's as though the present becomes our forge for memories and our perspective, what we choose to do with what we have and how we learn from our past. As Calvin once told Hobbes as written out by Bill Watterson, "the problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present." Perhaps, though, this conundrum is not a problem, but a chance to take hold and live for the present where everything becomes clear for what has been and what will be in how we experience our lives in our interconnected world.

The rain clears slowly while the sun becomes a source of hope as the love we can feel brightens our fear.

Free

Though we in the United States often talk about freedom, we don't often talk about feeling free because quite honestly, we are usually bound by the fetters of insecurity, regret, and worry. All these things make it impossible to be truly free, and similarly, make it impossible to feel free to be yourself; the person you are and no one else. Yet, when we let go, being free can release us of those persistent pieces of our thoughts that edge out the moment where we can create our present which gives us permission to shape our future.

Moments of freedom come from this release, and can also be available in activities where we must focus on ourselves and our surroundings or find ourselves missing the way forward. In contra dancing, each move is part of a sequence, both alone and with a partner and other pairs of partners that are part of a certain timing. Although there is often time to catch up if something is missed, it still alters the flow slightly. As such, flow allows for moments of freedom within contra dancing. Even the music allows us to breathe and move in to community with ourselves and others sharing the set with you.  Recently when I was dancing, there was a moment between the neighbor whom I balanced and swung with where the rhythm, movement, and connection provided an interpersonal oneness that was not necessarily spiritual, but understanding and knowing. With worry and doubt, this couldn't have been experienced, but in the present, we can take what we bring to each interaction and allow it to shape both our reality and thoughts towards what was and what is so that the past doesn't always have to be a trap on our present.

These minutes of dancing can be short or long, and they can release me into a freedom of joy and deep contentment that leaves me accepting the future and the past as beautiful parts that are shared in the present. By sensing the beauty of life in its freedom that you must give yourself permission to experience, the way through to the future is unlocked by release and embrace.

Contra Dance at Cornell University - Ithaca, New York