A whole blank page, the rest of the journal. A task; a day; many possibilities for interdependence with the world. An entire teal planet hanging in the vast solar system that, boundariless, merges with an infinite universe.
I lost sleep over an unfinished project with a finite end: my responsibility is not to re-create, only to compile others’ work. Peace doesn’t come because I get what I want (e.g. closure of a difficult task). Peace, real peace, is finding serenity, that safe cove, in the very moments of what I could otherwise experience as a tempest. I pulled “presence” from my angel cards two days ago. I had been intending to pull a new card for weeks. The altar where the angel cards are stacked had been piled with several years’ worth of nests, insects, a dried rose, beach rocks, a crab carapace, feathers and leaves. I cleared away many of the old sacred objects a few weeks ago; those that had been given to me from nature I returned to the earth in a sort of ceremonial offering.
The now-clean, spacious altar (the adorned top level of a small, pretty bookshelf) frees me as I gaze down. It affords me an inner roominess that I relish because I need it so much.
Even with my strong aesthetic sensitivities and my visual enjoyment of beauty, I am also drawn to order, tidiness, clutterlessness. Somehow I felt the tensions and anxieties, however briefly or in tiny measure, dissipating as I looked at the nautilus from the South Pacific with healed cracks; the real rabbit’s foot found near a cabin I frequent; a bird’s nest made from my hair; and the small wooden cube-of-a-box, inside which are hidden a number of very tiny trinkets. The dragonfly startled me; I’d already forgotten how gingerly I placed him there a few weeks ago. Yes; the moments gazing at my altar and giving brief but full attention to each of these beloved items were enough to remind me to come back to this deeper place of self.
Out of head, sinking down into body… root… core… soul. And the instant I do so, I am enlarged, more expansive, able to pull back from a focus on minutiae and detail to see the larger patterns.
No, I didn’t “see” the larger perspective, I felt it. “Seeing” is a head exercise, a mental construct or idea or rationalization. I felt my interdependence spiraling - as I gazed at the imperfect, yet intact, healed shell – moving outward, downward. It was a movement toward becoming pinpoint- focused on the inside – just at the place where the heart lives in this corpus I call “my body”; simultaneously, effortlessly, this piercing moment of right now generates the concentric circles that reach broader - out into the world.
The stuff that matters, really, at the core/center/heart is what connects us all so deeply. We imagine that the human emotions associated with tragedy, intimacy, or change are where we intersect; I feel this interconnection with others runs deeper, still. It must reside deeper than emotion if we are intertwined with the trees, meditation gong, or salty sea breeze.
Throwing the stone into the waters of my heart has repercussions universe-wide.
And, I know that the more open-hearted, compassionate, I become, the more serene and joyous and connected I become – open to others, all beings. The aesthetics of presence are synonymous with peace.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
