01 Jan Light in the New Year

Am in a small town in a valley surrounded by mountains in southern Mexico. It feels a bit like small town outside Sante Fe, but much poorer. Am adjusting….there is nothing to do…unplugging is taking time, but was helped these last days with belly cobby wobbles and laying in bed. Seems this is one way that my body is bringing me home. Musings come in this new year.

Reflections on 2016 brings me to June when I was sick in bed.

Immobilizing symptoms offered me a week of sleeping and long hours looking out our second story bedroom window into the tree tops of a silver maple. I watched leaves glistening with morning light and birds flit branch to branch then fly away only to return a few minutes later.

As the days passed a deep calm settled into my system.

I gradually regained strength, enjoying a few months of lingering contentment -walking in our woods and doing very little, yet feeling my life so enriched with the simple.

In the fall that familiar angst to do, to become, to work on clearing my inner life, to obsess about work, aging, and questioning what really matters took hold once again. The ease was replaced with anxiousness as I pensively looked outside of myself for answers.

I felt unsettled and far away from the quiet contentment of watching light on leaves. A rushing kind of caffeinated energy flooded my system…I felt on the brink of some big Leo manifestation! 

So the fall unfolded into December and last night on New Year’s Eve, reflection upon my year arose amidst the fireworks.

Quiet days laying in bed in June came filtering back thru everything else that happened last year. I waited to sense what else might arise, yet nothing else perforated this prominent memory…and there was the feeling of guidance.

The first days of 2017, I feel less furrowed in my brow, unburdened, and closer to myself…at peace, informed by the ways I am so deeply nourished, allowing light on leaves to be enough.

Recent reflections about what stirs passion and these last months wondering about a fuller expression of myself, seems to have emptied into the simplest of simple…this dimension of myself I have demeaned and overlooked for a more flamboyant persona of who I think I am supposed to be. Perhaps my way of passionate expression is entrusting my body to the depths of quiet, and thru that portal into the numinous……..

The words of the teacher I am most guided by, Ramana Maharishi, come to me.

“Silence and not doing few know this.”

This self-return has a simple sweetness about it, a feeling uncomplicated and natural. Interior pressure releases. Nervous system remembers neutral. There is nothing to do or change or become.. Perhaps this is the experience of being…?…..a forgotten effortlessness…..simultaneously familiar and foreign, scary and safe, boring and beyond any thing.

Here in the Mexican outback, unplugged from daily routine, in a kind of retreat, landscape open, big sky… wandering….discovering…allowing the body time and space to recall and live the feeling of unbecoming…to allow it to be deeply ingrained enough to with stand reentry into the western way of things or at least to be a more established point of reference.

Wishing you a New Year of listening with awareness, trusting your unique flow, and your version of komorebi, the Japanese word for the play of light dancing upon green leaves……

Love, Patricia