Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
– Wu Men, 12c Chinese poet
(transl: S. Mitchell)
Month: April 2015
letting joy surface
I’m realizing the things I liked to do as a kid are still the among the things that bring me the most joy–drawing, writing, exploring. Untimed things. Things with no real point or purpose, except to be free and alive. And they were the things I seemed to think were ‘frills’ when I entered adulthood. I let them go, or (worse) tried to make them things I controlled, like I thought grown ups should do. Isn’t it an adult’s job to worry, after all?
Anxiety for me happens when I try to control things that are beyond my control–which seemed the whole theme of adulthood, until I figured out it didn’t have to be.
What brings you joy? Give yourself permission: make some joy today.
Walking home from CVS
night suddenly pink
under streetlamp moon
drizzle wets black mulch
fragrant as perfume
heady cedar, pencil-shaving,
sandalwood scent
a half-gallon of milk
swinging in my hand
I drink darkness,
taste the sky, swollen with
tulip poplar blooms waving
in the wind
Or maybe it is just too much iced Starbucks?
Every time I travel I am energized and struck by new possibilities. As the plane begins its descent, I wiggle in my seat and think: I could live here (or there or there). The world brims with sparkling promise, the way ocean waves shimmer and dance all the way to the blurry far off horizon on a blue June day.
As the plane lands, I feel so full of life. In a flash I understand completely why even tired old horses prance so excitedly on windy fine mornings. They smell change on the wind.
Suddenly anything seems possible.
I want to run to the edge of the boundaries—those fences I built or the world erected to contain me.
And then to push past that, and find the elusive place where I can live beyond old fears. Where I can revel. And completely relax. It could be anywhere. It could be inside me.
Will people think I’m strange if I prance in this spring wind?
eeo 