the foreign and the familiar

Where do I start today?

It's a little after 9am on Sunday morning. I just 'hoovered' my first cup of coffee (espresso with milk) in 2 weeks, one of the most delicious experiences I've had for awhile. It was a necessary step to sitting at this cafe and working away at a computer; good to purchase something when accessing otherwise free internet services. The sea is to my right. I sit by the window of the cafe so that I can plug my housemate's MacBook into the wall. I can hear the occasional seagull, the low rhythm of the waves, behind the staccato of the locals around me waking up with their own liquid caffeine (and nicotine). I wonder how many espressos I can afford (physiologically and financially) as I enjoy a light breeze through the window and the space to type something genuine, something true.

Breathe. I drop into myself, bring some awareness to my ever changing system of thoughts, feelings, impulses, and sensations. My morning writings (pen and paper) have been a torrent of words, encompassing angst, struggle, peace, quiet, and lightness. This morning I wrestled with the juxtaposition between life as both familiar and foreign. Perhaps at any given moment during a human experience there is a tango, a pull towards keeping things familiar and a simultaneous inclination to exploring the unknown. I feel this tension, this dance in my body.

When I put my body down in bed at the end of each day, there remains a low hum of vigilance, a part of me is unwilling to sleep because it remains attuned to the environment around me. Only through waking meditation do I consciously invite myself to sink in, to rest, to feel into the space below the surface. As I sink deeper, I find the location in the universe that is unchanging, unchangeable. Regardless of place, regardless of events, activities, surroundings, language, physical being, emotions, or thoughts, this place is constant. And yet, even in its constancy it's constantly moving - not the quality of moving each of us knows living on the surface of life but moving that is pulsing with colour and life, pure breath.

Unfortunately, I don't choose to anchor myself this way very often. I am highly susceptible to slipping into the more surface currents of the water and getting tossed around like debris. I get to a place of exhaustion and complete disorientation and then I react with a need to control - a kind of false grounding built on the illusion of individual will. And then I become more disconnected from my body, more depleted, until I collapse. At the end of my rope, there's nothing left to do but drop. With grace through exhaustion, I find myself with nothing left to do but, once again, find solace through surrender, through finding the quality of peace which is not dependent on circumstances but which finds its source in the ground of being.

And so it goes. Over the last two weeks, I've repeated this cycle many times. Sadly, most mornings I find myself trying to 'redo.' I forget how futile it is to muscle my way into the world through better management of the surface waves (schedule, expectations, physical space, circumstances, individual energy level) and I return to my familiar habits - the way most of us get through. After two weeks of this cycling, my mind recognizes the futility but my body still knows the dance so well, so mindlessly. Funny how 'familiar' then reveals itself as a cage, a system of movements I can't seem to easily alter and 'foreign' emerges as the quality of my human existence that has always been with me and has never wavered in its invitation to 'return.'

So, how am I? I'm tired. Exhausted really. Not the type of exhaustion which comes from too much activity or exercise. Different. There is a fairytale called "The Red Shoes." In it, a young girl is given a pair of beautiful red shoes and she is so enraptured with their shinyness and shimmer and she puts them on her feet. She begins to dance, and dance, and dance, and she can't stop dancing. Her feet are moving on their own power and she can neither stop nor get them off her feet. Ultimately, she meets a woodsmen who uses his axe to chop off her feet. The story goes on with continued insights and wisdoms. The meanings are woven into the archetypes. I am the girl, the shoes, the woodsmen, and the axe.

I know that the dancing I am doing right now is a necessary and vital part of my growth. I know that in this dancing I am meeting new ways that I move, I feel more than see how this way of moving in the world has always been in me. The difference is that due to my current circumstances, the dancing is gruelling and my patterning is louder, revealing my habits as unsustainable. I can't find more energy to fuel the dance. I must find my own way to chop off the shiny red shoes.

My salvation, I think, lies in finding a way to sink to the bottom of the sea, finding a way to the timeless and spaceless space, the spot on the ocean floor which is directionless and eternal.

Ironic that I have finished my second cup of coffee and am considering a third. Funny how we have created rituals in our busy lives to help us maintain a good 'on', other rituals which assist us to turn 'off.'

I'm not sure I would have been so aware of this patterning had I not spent the last year or so of my life living a life of great solitude in a moldy, cold cottage in the woods of northern New England. And so, as I sit here in this beautiful land, beside the constant rhythm of the ocean, and under the rays of the unchangeable sun, I am deeply grateful for the ways that life is guiding me and teaching me always, inviting me to wake up and drop in.

My gratitude goes out also to those of you who have reached out to me in various ways in the last two weeks - your words and presence in my life have been tethers, connecting me to another (maybe the same) abiding source of unconditional energy, Love.

That's it for now. A third cup of espresso would definitely disconnect me from any kind of authentic ground.