Blog of Jennifer J. Wilhoit/TEALarbor stories

23 June 2017

Inner Risings

The sunrise occurs even on days I have not acknowledged it.

Yet my body longs for this view. The ahhhh upon seeing this rising sun is as fresh each time as the last: “awe” in perfection. It is that gasp that tells my body—like a messenger to the depths of my soul—to pay attention, to reach out.up.over, to drink deeply with my eyes, to experience mindfully with my heart.

Because even though this miraculous light show happens every single morning (whether cloud-obscured or not), it is new, its own tantalizing breath of a newborn thing.

I guzzle down the sunrise and feel how it creates a wide, open landscape within me, how it plants trees of gold upon which dance feathery gifts. The sustenance of sunrise brings me closer to shining health, to complete vision, to total compassion. My body fills up with this tonic. A refreshment, but also a necessity.

So, yes—I begin most mornings with a sunrise. I let it fill and guide me. I allow it to nourish all that needs to be fed within. I offer to it every single wound. I am brought fresh into the strength of the day. And like yesterday’s rolling surf, I feel rocked and held by the glories of nature.

The sunrise occurs everyday. Every. Day. We all know this, but how many days go by with scarcely an upward glance?

The sun rises; when we crack open our door of willingness that which shines within us also rises. Inside and outside can be felt as they are—as one. And the vast expanse of our inner landscape is aglow, animating the lifeblood that is love.

(Originally posted: July 2015)

21 June 2017

Image of the Week

"Flourishing Bird" June 17, 2017 Dried Paulownia Blossoms
for Radical Joy for Hard Times' Global Earth Exchange: Making Beauty in Wounded Natural Places

19 June 2017

Monday Musings CREATIVE PRACTICE: “Floral Arrangement”

TEALarbor stories’ Monday Musings are practices and quotations offering simple ways to explore the ecotone of the inner/outer landscape.

Collect some fallen petals or flowers that have dried up in the garden; arrange them in your home in a way that pleases you. Making beauty with natural objects is one way our inner landscape can flourish.

16 June 2017

Lakeside Reflections

As we sit on the shore in the last bits of a day torn up by road time, stops for information, and restocking supplies, our spirits are sewn back together by the calm of the gently rippling lake. This intimate spot is held by the Rocky Mountains rising up behind the nearer foreground of nested hills. White scatterings run in uneven stripes and clumps—no pattern except gravity taking the snow down in runoffs and slides. A waterfall rushes in the far distance, not visible but fully present with us. The far shore’s evergreen forest is a tiered shelf of upside down ice cream cones awaiting the giant’s hand that will pluck and fill it with the elixir of life: homemade ice cream the color of tanned hides, the texture like the bouldery path we hiked earlier. No matter how still and straight the brown, tan, and black tree trunks stand on the bank to the left, their not-identical twin watery image waves, spins, and wiggles like happy dancing snakes.

The mountains standing in observance of the water’s life-giving powers are mirrored over and over again—their inverted, jagged edges swimming toward me. I allow my right hand to reach out over the water, stretching toward and outlining the glistening liquid peaks; I feel sure I can touch the actual high alpine ridge tops just by making contact with their reflection. The edges move closer as if straining, too, to connect with my outstretched arm. I let the long, light echoes of late afternoon reach across the water in their looser, freer form and lap at my fingertips. The bouncing lines of giggling lake water make a small, gentle sound—kissing the pebbles on the small shoreline on which we sit. It is an embracing sound: the baby’s sweet coo, the dog’s heavy sleep-breath, the sigh of a lover after he’s spent himself intertwined with his sweetheart.

Journal Entry 2011 Montana