“If you are looking at somebody else to dictate to you, to decide for or against, you will never be able to know what your life is. It has to be lived, and you have to follow your own small light.”
-Osho “Life, Love, Laughter”
I am finally getting into the Osho book that I brought along to El Salvador. It has been sitting on my bookshelf at home for months now, collecting dust. I have picked it up and purposefully tried to get through it a number of times with no success. I think it actually spent a well intentioned week in my purse at one stage, another in my car.
Osho is one of my favourite authors, and his books are always timely for me. I guess it just hasn't been time until now. This very morning, four days into my retreat, the words are opening up to me and flooding into my heart.
The truth is that it has taken me this long to find the place of stillness within me where all good things find route. My writing, my thoughts, my spirituality, all draw from this well. I have to be drinking from this well for the words of Osho to make sense to me, to resonate within me. Otherwise I am like a starving woman who is being offered words in place of bread.
The fact that I am now devouring his words gives me hope that I am healing.
I still do not have an answer, but I am beginning to make peace with not asking. My questions are not meant to be answered with words or a directive or lesson. I am meant to just live out my questions every day walking in the direction in which I feel convicted. I am not meant to verbalize these questions- I am not meant to pray them to an outside divinity- I am meant to sit quietly in the river of my soul and bring my questions to my source.
I am returning to the place in which I dwelt when I was a child. Maybe this is why people travel and travel only to return to the town of their birth- not because of the familiarity, but because there is a memory there of a confident and complete self untarnished by the world.
My childhood self was in many ways much more complete than I am now. I am returning to her each time I meditate, each time I write from my soul, each moment I spend in solitude. When I was young, I simply KNEW what my heart was asking of me: “...today I must walk through the forest, singing...” or, “...today I must spend on the lake, writing.” Often in solitude, often in silence, walking transcendentally through the moments of my youth.
The memory of the stillness of my forest returns to me as clear as day. While I feel the tropical winds on my skin and hear the ever present roar of the surf here in El Salvador, my mind carries me back to a very different setting. The crunch of needles and brush beneath my feet. The scent of earth, of sunlit decay, of moss and dew and pine and sap. The feel of bark beneath my palms. The scratch of rocky handholds as I climbed small mountains. The resistance of the forest in scratches and scrapes as I attempted to mold it into forts and secret hiding places.
And the moments when the light would cascade through the tree branches above just so, the cry of the loon to his beloved ringing out, the plop of a fish catching her breakfast, the steady lap of the water testing its boundaries. There in those spaces I would transcend- not out of myself, but within, deep into the core of my being where I too became part of the orchestra, where all that is essential within me communed with all that is essential in existence. Where the fish and the moose and the beaver and the poplar and I could hold court with one another- where we each drew from and offered up the energy of our beings.
I have forgotten how to live this way. I now reside mostly in opposition to all that is naturally around me. I build my house and paint it and dress it up in ways that discourage harmony with the wild world. I hide behind my door when it is too hot or too cold outside and I do not take the time to commune any more.
The calls to walk in the wild always come at such inconvenient times and there is just so much to do in my silly little life. I ignore them. For laundry, for work, for movies, for friends I ignore them. For television, for shopping, for groceries and cleaning I ignore them. I tell myself I will answer next time. Next time I will walk in the woods again. And then the voice becomes too quiet to hear. I have stifled my heart.
Something important within me is lost.
Lately I have heard the whispers again. The callings of trees and the secret places in the forest. Perhaps my heart is reawakening, and is being called to by these natural spaces to come and sit awhile and present my offering as I cherish that which is being offered.
Back to my trees and my forests then, soon I will go, but for now: the ocean. For now the steady waving palms. For now the salt and the surf and the sun. Renewal, for now. Peace and solitude and quiet exploration of my self for now. This time is a time to practice living again, so that I may return to my woods and have something to offer for the communion.
The call beats louder in my heart like a drum. Oh, how I've missed that song...
~^~
No comments:
Post a Comment