I don’t want to live in the
close-ended questions:
When will thus and so occur? Will the
discussion revolve around such and such? Are we going to do this thing? If so,
when? How many hours a day will I really be able to do that which I desire to
do? How many hours, days, weeks will that thing I want last? Will I still be able
to do this and that in a year, in two years, when I am sixty? Am I likeable
enough, lovable enough, friendly enough, diligent enough, powerful enough,
creative enough, smart enough, tough enough, healthy enough, beautiful enough,
and blah, blah, blah enough?
And these ad nauseam
questions stifle and gag me. They draw my breath into them so I have no air
left to live in, to inhale. I am stripped of vitality and passion as well as
fortified (imagine a big fortress wall) against “the emergent” when I focus so
narrowly – so tritely-but-not-benignly.
Instead, I want to live into,
draw breath from and breathe into questions – expanding “Self and Other,”
becoming one and fused with All That Is – that are about practices,
spontaneity, flow, richness and depth, texture and light.
How can we co-create a life,
out of our individual strengths, that adds compassion to this world? In what
ways can we begin to conceive of the collective and our role in that?
How can we model the ebb and
flow of our lives after seasons and cycles so that:
“gaps” become interstices;
“redundancy” becomes the rich
ecotone of layered experience;
“separation” becomes an
opportunity for rich solitary inquiry;
“fondness” becomes acceptance
of all beings as we are, limiting judgment;
“frustration” becomes an
honoring of the beauty in difference;
“callousness” becomes a
turning point for the arising of compassion;
“fear” becomes openness;
“anger” becomes softness and
vulnerability;
“angst” becomes faith, trust,
and then peace?
I want to remember that the
osprey will come back, year after year to nest atop the platform at the local
park. I want to recall in the darkness of winter that there will be another
springtime. During summer’s long days, I want to recall the darkness in the
corner of my own soul. It is my desire to reach out with a wide embrace,
challenging my own limiting thoughts and behaviors so that I may engage Life
open-endedly. I begin by reframing the questions from close-ended,
simple-answered ones to those that weave together strands of body, psyche, mind
and spirit…so that it is with wholeness that I greet the world each morning.
To paraphrase EB White: Each
morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor
it. The only way I can savor this one life I have is to balk at the urge to
shut down, and to practice opening, again and again, to the largeness and even
the un-answerability of open-ended questions. It is a practice, a mantra, a
fervent hope carried in the seed of my heart.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
