Holding

                                           Photo credit J. Scott Bovitz

In the center of human life are those who hold it together. They make home what it is. They listen to "leaders", receive, decide whatever a country is, whatever a profession, a town--they establish that.

--William Stafford

I told my daughters that this has been the best summer of my entire life. My older daughter told me why that was. She said, "is it because you can let go more?"

I said, "yes."

The heaviness that weighed on me all my life is gone a lot of the time. This summer marks this lightness here to stay more consistantly. Sometimes I wait for the harsh voices to come back and haunt me with their wild refrains, that I am not enough, but often it remains silent.

I hear the sounds of my life instead. Digging deep into soil, learning from the plants about optimism, resilience and balance. I hear the sound of my fingers tickling ivory keys, communing with souls gone by in a language that doesn't bother with semantics. I hear dishes and clothes being washed, and food being prepared, while a strong heart beats.

I like to think I am becoming one of those who hold it together, instead of tear it apart--unlocking access to a saner individual, who isn't just going through the motions of daily life, while dragged behind a horse, but who has found home within, and can therefore see how to make one externally--or, at the least, point to it.

In those moments when the noise in or around me becomes so overwhelming that I fuse with it, I honor that my pain is trying to tell me something. It always does.

Usually, it wants to lead me to greater release, greater ease. It wants to show me how deeply I value unconditional love above all, how much I desire to release my fellow man and myself from my terrorizing, and how much I already have.

There is a lot less thrashing and a lot more embracing.

I can see how living can be beautiful, on the other side-- how what is in place for us can work, and how we can work with it.

What I am understanding is to be one to hold it together, is to be one that has gathered her experiences back around her, no longer running from them--with no more war to fight. And with all that space, a simple beingness can't help but burst into bloom.