Can we become intimate with the place that we find ourselves in… in every way, sensuously with our whole bodies – from our minds, our nervous systems, the pores of our skin… feeling and exploring, becoming hospitable to this place, to this now.
And from our shared humanity and interbeing with all of life, can we see what the eagle would see, can we experience what the mole, the bee or the tree might experience… can we really know this place and so know ourselves more intimately… and so hold ourselves with more loving kindness, with more acceptance. Knowing that what we long for is the peace of acceptance.
Instead of thinking of the next place… where does the next step take me? Or if a step feels impossible, the next breathe. Can we come into fine attention of the microcosm beneath our feet and simultaneously remember that we are the dust of exploding stars. Not just you and me… but all of us. The man begging at the traffic light. The child caught up in war. The politician at the helm. Our loved ones… those nearest to us.
We like to think of our journeys as straight lines, but perhaps we can adopt a leaf out of Robert McFarlane’s book and lean into this idea of an unpious pilgrimage… instead of conquering a mountain peak, we traipse all over the plateau… exploring every boulder, every crevasse, every ridge, every valley every peak, every bush… and come to know this place intimately. To find belonging in communion and conversation with all that is alive here as it is alive in us, as it is us.
And when we feel spent in the knowing arrive again as if for the first time. Can we as Rilke suggests learn…
“to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
From my heart to yours,
Tarien