For the past week and counting, so many different thoughts, words, client-family-friend conversations, and necessary actions for my business have been crowding my being— one thing on top of the next, on top of the next— coming in so fast that my head feels thick, my mind heavy, my body dense.
Between appointments, I get in the car and head out to a nearby trail. Instead of replying to messages stacked in my inbox, I walk along a path thickly covered in decomposing leaves, broken branches, stones of all sizes, and a surprisingly silky layer of large-flaked frost.
I let the sun and cold air into my lungs deep enough that they begin to ache.
I consider the time that I took at the turn of the year to empty into no-thing. I recognize that with that emptying comes space….space for any-thing….and so all sorts of things rush in to fill the void…all sorts of thoughts, words, images piling in, one on top of the next on top of the next.
And then, in the short span of one widening, deepening breath,
I slow down and enter the moment newly…
I open my attention to what else is here beyond what is pressing upon me with immediacy. I experience the space, the textures, the nuances, the silence between what is flowing out and what is coming in.
I discover what lightens me, brightens me, softens me, splinters me, shakes me, surprises me….
When I enter this breath, this moment newly, I feel the sun and cold air circulating through my being and I ask,
For what do I truly ache?
What do I deeply long for?
photos: me, January 14, 2019.
Thank you for your presence here.