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.

       

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.

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.    

E Pluribus Unum - Out of Many, One

Sometimes I look at the lives around me in the depths of reality today, the depths that come from the places I walk, I hear something quieter than the breeze. I hear a heartbeat that beats on a day that takes its place in a string of years and seasons that have created me to help shape the experience of today. I see the inspiration that struck wonder as it filled my eyes as a child and feel the shiver of joy that life is greater than my own experience. It sometimes shapes the spirit of the experience of a team, a country, a family, a friendship, that together we are one, and together we can be alive and make the future out of this. A future that can be harmonious if we dream and act together, if we hear the heartbeat of our neighbors and trust them to hear our own.

The trust and vulnerability in connection from community to friendship is fragile, yet precious as we feel or begin to sense the togetherness that helps us feel our embrace. It is difficult to know this depth even imagine when we have often known fear, despair, loneliness that has been bred from disappointment, discouragement, and exclusion. We know that exposure may take us further down the road of pain that we've known. So how can my life and your touch a life where we may see the hint of a smile? How can we build community and friendships when we have only been disappointed?

I think hope and heart can be grown from vision and feeling. Feeling that life isn't always the sunshine of smiles and laughter, but sometimes the numbness of past trauma haunting our present. Sometimes it is the continuous rainfall that floods our feelings and overwhelms us with discouragement and washes out the work we have done together. When a tragedy caused by human hands shatters our community, does it fracture everyone irreparably, or does it give birth to healing?
Healing that creates a scar to help us remember what we have gained, what we have grown, and taught by one life who's ripples still touch our lives as the memory of a life is carried always. We can sing and hold those close to us, and even those we have just met, to continue to build on memory and what we have.

These are the roots that can hold the soil where we grow together. Roots are the friendship and connection where we grow. Tears of remembrances and sunshine of continued hope and an embrace grow and help enrich the community that has blossomed from shared memory. Fear is real, but hope is true, where we hear the voices we have together. Voices from the soul that we feel growing from scars and wounds, and also from new beginnings, from forgiveness and from our lives shared with friends. There, barefoot, we can feel and hear the melody with the rhythm of our heartbeat join in community. The spirit of unity begins with one heart, one friendship that is shared over a lifetime, and one collective experience of unique perspectives and beginnings that are always the continuation of our growth.

A Path For the Heart

The road less traveled is often quoted when one is proud of the unique path they have chosen. To blaze a trail or follow the way with less footprints often gives us a journey with a more complex landscape. If life were a musical composition, we could either follow the melody line or expand on what is simple and elaborate on the tones and tempos as the music notes rise and fall. This is more than taking a short cut to make something easier, this is taking a path from what opens our lives to creativity, connection, and challenge that helps us live a little bit more and understand that sometimes it is the path to hearing our hearts and our  history.

We often have to take a detour from the path we were taking because life is always under construction. The detour can also be our choice as Robert Frost's poem explains. When we take off our shoes and creep forward towards the frontiers of our comfort levels, we become pioneers discovering how surprisingly beautiful a life can be lived when it isn't always planned out. To some this might be wanderlust, others improvisation, and without both we cannot chart new waters in our lives.

Improvisation. As a part of art or comedy or music, I think part of it comes from an inner restlessness that comes from being tired of the same old routines or in other words, boredom. Another part probably comes from the reaches of the human spirit - exhaustion, terror, rage, inspiration, speechless experiences that can only be evoked through the stirrings of the soul that come out in art. It seems to be the way of creativity, the way of reaching into the rhythm of one's body or one's community and moving forward in response to these pulls that guide us down our own road less traveled.

Sometimes interruptions create these forks in the road that give us the choice of how fast our lives are going. Life always looks like it's going fast when looking through the photo album and through the rear view mirror, but that's because we're seeing all that has happened all at once rather than over the time it took for us to experience these things. I'm not saying we have to blow all over the place like a balloon in the wind, but I'm thinking that if we release some of our routine to our senses, our surroundings and feel our soul take hold, we can begin to find the beating drum of our heartbeat. With that we can possibly realize the human possibility where peace and harmony based on each of our souls, pieces of the diverse puzzle of humanity can be real as the riffs we play from our lives.

balloon in the wind

fun with photography

your own path by water

or land

Unplanned Beauty

You cannot hold onto the moment, you can only make it last by knowing that the past is what you do with the present. So let the present define what you want your future to be. I wrote this tonight thinking about what life would be like if we knew that our moments are never lost, but changed by the future that is always appearing while our past is what is made of our present. It sounds more complicated than it really is because the past is often with us in our memories or those of other people or in photographs, journals, blog posts, or dreams.

Many times, what we find beautiful is what surprises us. It is unplanned, but we can choose how to accept it or what to make of it. We can be sad because it is fleeting, or fragile, or artificial or we can be amazed at how precious and timely it is. It can also be the realization that your life is changing, and that on the outset new realizations reflect new growth that you never thought was possible before.

I regularly volunteer at a comfort care hospice home where I provide care for residents and their families and friends who visit their loved one during his or her final days. It is a place where peace and love can be given and received not based on what one has done, but because one thrives with it. It is a place where the presence of light in each of us is made known as a beacon of hope or a reassuring comfort that one is not alone, when dying, or being with the dying. Many times while I am there, I find beauty in the moments that are fleeting, the moments that I can't always choose or create, but live with everything to experience and be an important part of.

This past weekend I spent two, four hour shifts listening and being with our resident, and her family. It can be a gift to step into the life of a family at such a moment where you meet loved ones knowing the tenderness and uncertainty of each day that may be someone's last. In these circumstances, there are many beginnings and many times to realize that this is all life is. The beginnings in new aspects of relationships, new chapters of life, beginnings of realizations, and the part of us that takes in another's memory as they pass on.

This may be all life is, but it is through our actions in it that it becomes something extraordinary. Lifting a child up in the air as he laughs, filling taco shells and sharing a meal with those we meet along this journey, crying with a daughter by her dying mother's bedside, hearing two men playing guitars and sharing what will be a memory worth reminiscing in the future, and knowing that what we do to live is what really matters, for life is not about just oneself, it is about everyone.

Unplanned beauty may be the most fleeting and it can be the most inspiring. It is where the light within our soul radiates through our being and connects to the instant we are no longer anyone else but ourselves, with our very personality, and knowing this is what we cannot hold, but what we can remember and make our lives with, both alone and with the human family.

Candles lit outside the hospice home in memory of  loved ones.

Why Barefoot?

Before I get very far in describing those moments that make me realize that this is life, in moments and instances of indescribable wonder, I want to go into depth in explaining what I mean by "life barefoot."

By being barefoot, it is possible to experience more because you aren't feeling just the air against your arms or face, but the ground beneath your feet. Once barefoot, it is easier to be sensitive to what you hear or smell. Then you can realize that you might be able to see things more vividly and taste the complexities in food if you happen to be munching on something. Whenever I go barefoot, somehow I notice more, however that does not mean I have to be without shoes or socks constantly to live this way.

Life barefoot is a reality and a metaphor for experiencing the senses of life that create the experiences and moments that are full of beauty and amazement that make one feel their soul or know they've stepped into something utterly beyond words - yet this is what I want to try to do. As described in my first post, I want to put words to these feelings and times that have become a memory or a moment that just took you and made you realize that this is what life is all about. That this is not about what could be, but it is about what is, and what you find to be increase your capacity for stepping into the beauty that surprises you.

This is a way of being inspired, for the life you have is yours. Seize it, and find the opportunity to live in it and to live barefoot.