I am looking out the window at a grove of tall trees. They look so stable, so permanent, so balanced. They don’t look like they are nervous or lack self-esteem. I know that every little vibrating bit of the universe is in constant motion including these trees, never static, never perfectly still. Did I just use the words never and perfectly? Am I insane?
Some people appear to be tree-like, centered, eternal, at peace. But I know for me and everyone I’ve ever known we are a sea of molten change. Fear and love and ego and addiction and doubt and hubris and sloth and hormones. We have all these forces pulling us in different directions; sometimes straight towards invisible cliffs in pursuit of safety (mea culpa). Some unwittingly give their lives to pleasure or fame or recognition or abuse or delusion or substances or co-dependence. Those omnipotent invisible synaptic pathways, those magically powerful dopamine receptors.
What is your blind spot? What is your need or the sound bite stuck on endless auto-play in your head? What do you see when you look at a sunrise or are presented with an opportunity? I know for me it took years of looking inward and reading and walking and drinking and talking and missing out to even start to figure it out. How long do we go before we realize that we are wearing glasses with distorted lenses? Do the trees look different once these lenses are put down on the night stand? How can anything ever be the same once we finally realize we are wearing glasses that distort? A tree is not even the same as the word tree nor the image in your brain of a tree or what I see before me. So many flavors! Our brains are plastic, we can change anything if we work hard enough. Foods and colors will “true” once we move calmly gracefully back closer to balance, pull in the “over work” or “I am dumb” or “I am not safe” flailing sails pulling us aimlessly through these precious days.
I am a work in progress. A naked blank slate. An impatient wanderer. A good-enough being in search of the myth of safety; maybe over that next crest? It is fascinating to discover what has been there since the beginning, shrouded by my out-of-whack need for safety. Calm sure is novel. Wants rather than needs are fun. Helping myself and hopefully helping others are inseparable and indistinguishable. Can I really successfully replace the “I am not safe” with “I am love”? It sure is fun trying. I hope I continue to practice this every day.
Some are stuck on needing to be angry or to be heard or to be a victim. Some are in need of confirmation or reassurance or to find that the world is as horribly vicious as we always knew it to be (so there!) Like a spinning top that is nearly perfect, but of course nothing is perfect, so it starts to wobble, and soon the spin is the wobble, the wobble violently takes over. The top becomes the wobble. What is your wobble? What is coloring all your senses? What is standing between you and me and just being? We are born anew every time one of our wobbles is pulled towards the center just a little bit, everything else in us and in everything around us conscience or not, finds a new state, a new inter-relation. Picture a figure skater doing one of those really cool spins. Everything is new every single moment of every single day of eternity. My wobble today is not my wobble of yesterday. My wobble would like to know if your wobble can come out and play?
