Living in the Place Between Elation and Despair

Over the past few weeks, I sacrificed myself to constantly undulating experience.

It was not the Zen recognition that I am one with the great waves of the sea, rolling in and rolling out in a constant dancing pattern to eternity. I was making no metaphors to help me realize I bear my own ocean of breath that is forever washing in and out of my faithful lungs.

No, I was letting myself be thrown into the air, high on untethered adrenaline and then allowing myself to get lost in the panic of the free fall back to earth (or the water, to drag that metaphor a bit further).

In a bid for financial security (the buzz word actually is meant to be “abundance”), I actually offered up any sort of peaceful control I might have had over my routines of sleep and recollection, focused work and unselfish love.

Ok, I am being a bit dramatic here, I know. Part of that is probably rooted in that I have written oh-so-little of late that I am just reveling in my ability to weave tangled webs of succulent, hyperbolic words. I guess I am just rejoicing that I caught myself before I really got lost. I came back to this space before all of my dear readers gave up on me. I’m ready to return to my novel before I decided to drop out of my writing group as a failed creative scribe.

But for all that I protest (too much…), I was still living during the last few weeks. I may have strayed from the plan I had intended for myself, and I may have been swinging madly between elation and despair, but it was still all an expression of some part of me. After all, John Lennon told us that “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

I was riding extremes, but isn’t that what living is, at least some of the time? It may not be the ideal – I am definitely excited to return to a more orderly lifestyle that supports dedicated contemplation rather than a fixation on “prosperity” – but sometimes I think we have to resign ourselves to riding the fluctuations of being and give ourselves over to that process.

All this is a way to tell myself that I forgive her for the wild ride. I need to remember that I must continue to take risks and trust that even if things do not end anything like I had planned, I am the stronger for having dared to stretch myself in a new direction.

Am I being a relativist, concocting lessons well learned so that I won’t have to feel so silly for temporarily being the mouthpiece for a company that was not what it purported to be?

Or am I wisely making the best out of a detour, reading it as an opportunity to understand and learn compassion for people who are driven by fears about money and wealth that are otherwise foreign to me? It is so easy to act from insecurity, to make choices based on fear of loss, of downward mobility.

I am blessed to have had this brief chance to see how these fears have played out in my own life and were able to take precedence over my true calling as a writer and a healer.

My dear ones, I will no belabor this awakening too much, but it was such an unexpected gift, this widened perspective. I guess the wonder potion that is Zrii still keeps giving even when its business prospects seem to have gone bust…

And so, these extremes of life… How can you catch a ride on these powerful forces to learn what you can and what you must? And then, how can you most gracefully step off the wild ride?

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Trusting the Abundance of the Feast

On this final Sunday of our winter retreat, this blissful stretch of days at home, I searched through the furthest reaches of the pantry for some “special tea.” I found a forgotten bag of loose chocolate mint roobois from our local tea room that I simply adore. I looked to my husband and remarked that he had bought this for me, once upon a time. He looked confused, “uh, must have been a long time ago.”

It was. Early in our courtship I would often go away on the weekends. Determined to prove my independence and let him know that I would be maintaining my own life, I resisted commitment every step of the way. I would return home to little gifts from a brilliantly persistent man intent upon taming a young redhead convinced she valued freedom over security, spontaneity over real love.

The morning’s tea was lovely, but not as nice as it might have been if I had enjoyed it back when it was first given to me as a token of a young romance. It was rich with memory, but it lacked the piquancy it once had when it was fresh.

This is not some oblique metaphor to say that my marriage has gone flat. Instead, it just sets me thinking about the odd ways we hoard our little treats, delaying our pleasures until we eventually we realized they have gone a little stale.

How many perfumes and lotions have you saved for special occasions only to find them in the back of the cabinet, their magic faded, their sweet essences separated into their uninspired base ingredients? How often has the treasured saffron turned into flavorless threads of crimson while you waited for that golden day you would create a paella your beloved ones would never forget? (Last night I threw my saffron saving self to last year’s hungry dogs and made this amazing North African chickpea and kale soup.)

This year, wisps of resolutions are coming to me in the form of little lessons, like when I sip my tea’s faded glory and when I generously toss spices into the mix.

Trust in abundance. Believe that you can enjoy what the Universe has given you. Be secure that what you need will come to you, even if you open your cupboards wide to share your bounty. Don’t hoard your own talents or your material treasures for a rainy day that will never come. Live in this moment. Allow your wings to spread to their fullest span.

Now, I am not celebrating the feckless grasshopper at the expense of the assiduous ant. I stand by the belief that frugality is not a crime. I am just talking about enjoying the simple luxuries you have and allowing them to make each day a little sweeter.

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photo by: xllukins

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Epiphany. The name of this blog was fueled only by a purely secular glory of revelation, and never even knew when the Epiphany was or what it really meant until last year.

And though I am growing more comfortable with Christianity in many ways, I realize that this feast does not necessarily speak to me directly, at least not the story itself does not. The appearance of the Wise Men, the giving of the gifts, heralding Christ’s birth to the gentiles. I think the weight of this story is finding me on a more subterranean level. The gift of tea seems to conjure frankincense, perhaps?

One symbol that does speak to me: following your star.

As a watcher of the skies and a dancer of the moon, I can hook myself to that great star that guided the Magi. For now it is leading me to epiphanies much more mundane that the birth of the savior, but it seems that it is all this sweetly contented moment in my life seems to require.