Solstice

There is no escaping this. No avoiding all this. No postponing any of us. And the shaping and embracing effect of you simply being here.  Of course everything is conditioning you, causing you to think , see, feel in the way only you can.  It’s part of the deal. Things will always be happening and relatively speaking they happen because of what’s just happened, because of everything that’s ever happened . What we are left with to make sense of any of it are handfuls of moments, memories, inextricable connections,  conversations, caresses. All laid out to bring you here. To this place, here, reading these words. Under a December sky, feeling the chill in the air. The taste of coffee on the tongue. All this sense making. Is It too much to ask for us to carry it all? Understand it all. Can we really trace it all back.? Gather it back to something so singular. To something so intimate, so fragile, so precious. (Like those tiny birds eggs I discovered once, hidden and veiled under some brambles) maybe it’s always here, beginning here again, continuously with you. If we pause and listen, not by trying or forcing. But by letting it come to us. Let it run through our fingers. Feel it flowing in our breath. Like the sun that is warming my face right now. Appreciate that it takes this indivisible wholeness, the whole of life to bring us together. There’s a kind of inevitability to all of it. A sort of familiarity to it. Like the opening phrases, or the final notes of a well loved song. You didn’t start this, you can’t control any of it. Maybe even your thoughts and choices depend on all the others having been exactly the way they were? This sounds ominous, confining, restrictive, yet so is resisting and rejecting the way that life actually arises to greet us every morning as we are and how it continually keeps inviting us to where we are yet to be. If we keep mistaking it for a stranger then we can justify ignoring it, blaming it and abusing it. All events, actions, occasions, celebrations, disappointments, griefs and joys, colour condition, grace and shape us. And often when we become distracted, tired and stop being attentive they can bind and confine us. But our lives don’t have to be that patch of brambles catching and scratching the skin. Our past an oily stain we can never wash out. It can be a spacious inviting place. A place where the past present and future can fold and unfold and be allowed to prove and deepen in flavour. A place where we can feel the kind of joy that comes when we stand in snowfall. No resistance, no control. Knowing we may get a little cold a little damp. But we don’t worry, we are carefree and wholly present, present to this wholeness, a holiness, thats here and always knows our name.