originally posted April 2, 2015

Pondering/Question: Derek Walcott’s poem Love after Love begins:
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome
Roger Housden uses this poem in ten poems to change your life to illuminate the importance to our human fullness for soul and conscious,habitual self to be unified. He says, “We spend much of our lives trying to make ourselves- to create the life we want, to forge some reality from our dreams…(yet) A deeper, truer life – truer to our authentic pattern- is wanting you to follow its course…”
When we each look and listen deeply today, what balance do we find between our soul and habitual self?

One story of Inquiry/Observation

Walking back to the house with an armload of kindling, my hood up as shelter against a spring snow squall, my mind preoccupied with the to-do list waiting for me inside, one slim piece of wood drops from my hands. Bending to retrieve it I come nearly eye level with a single leaf of the first glacier lily of the season. My narrowed perception instantly widens. The fluorescent green emerges from a two foot circumference of rich black earth, evidence of the logging operation underway to improve our forest’s health. Looking up I see through the newly opened understory and sense again the expanded breath of the trees left standing. Two weeks ago, when I first walked through the just cut acres, I expected to hear lament from the trees lying on the forest floor. Instead I heard celebration, as if the remaining rooted trees lifted their limbs toward the sky in thanksgiving for room to breathe.

My eyes return to the single stem. Yes, harbinger of the season to come, although today I am not racing in eagerness toward those days. Pulling my armload of wood closer to my chest I pause, suspended in reverence of the mystery that keeps the life force, the potential, of each flower buried deep through the winter. I don’t imagine this glacier lily as a seed kernel or bulb even though logic says it must be. It seems more like it has slept in the dark earth as a fragment of the earth itself, or as a space of possibility inserted between the crumbs of rock, spirit, not yet matter.

This year more than any other in a very long time I am aware of possibilities, of spirit poised to become matter. I pick up the piece of dropped kindling and head back to the house, my mind no longer on my to-do list. As I climb the steps into the house my mind traverses the backwoods, follows the speed of snowflakes falling between the tall ponderosa pine. When I drop the kindling into the barrel beside the wood stove I sense expansive quiet space around me, the waiting tasks floating like dust motes within the gift of unbound time.

For the past five days in the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about Walcott’s poem “Love after Love” and the words of wisdom and rejoicing in Roger Housden’s commentary. Without Housden’s words I doubt I would have deepened into the reminder the poem held for me. The pattern of our life, Housden reminds, is there from the start and our task in life is to discern, listen, make room for emergence. The imagined self greets the authentic self, the natural current of life. The soul and habitual self embrace in gladness and balance.

Walcott’s poem reads:
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.

For the past four months I have been increasingly aware of what is over in my life, completed in my heart if not yet concluded in the routines of my days. I have cleared and filed the clutter of papers in my office. In mindfulness practice my mantra is to widen my perception to include the deep wellspring of spirit at the same time I perform the mundane, to sense its presence even as my thoughts and emotions chatter on the surface in approval and disapproval. I have listened to the counsel of friends who encourage me to clear obligations so I can invest more in my gifts. To be like the trees left standing in our forest with room to grow taller, stronger. The sound of the current beneath has been growing louder. I hear its hum as the turn of water over rock, a single syllable, individuated words of direction not yet clear.

A year ago I would have quickened my step, felt urgency to get closer to the current, strained to perceive instruction. Today it is enough to hear the single long wind like sound, to sense the whole length of the riverway that has carried me from the beginning, that carries me into my future. Beneath my feet I hear distant, yet palpable, vibration of a thousand glacier lilies, fluttering at the boundary between spirit and form.