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I've been waking up abruptly the last few months to the same reoccurring feeling and sense: there is something I've forgotten, and I must urgently remember. I lay staring up at my ceiling, half awake and half dreaming, straining to recall just what it is I’m neglecting. No answers come. I can only compare it to a suffocating feeling of dread.
In the light of day, I've taken to asking myself, what is it that I have forgotten. I wrote a list of things that came to mind. There are many important tasks left undone and words unsaid. Cards you have failed to write, bills you have left unpaid. The time you haven't made to spend with someone you care for. Friends you haven't called; dreams you haven't notched away at. It turns out there was a long list of things I was forgetting. On that list, there was one that stood out to me. I need more slowness and attentiveness, more tranquility and reverence. I want to fold the laundry without the charge. Listen to my kids without half of my attention on some plan. I want to do what I love without pressure and goals. I want to stay in this one room, with the whole of me here, and have that be enough. If honest, I recognize the parts occupying an addicted and anesthetized way of being. This over-consumption of content and goods, the hustle, the scurry, the scramble, the push, the chase, the surge, all this speeding up, this making haste needs to stop. I have forgotten my body with all this matter of the mind occupying me. One thought too many stacked on top of the other, and the seam begins to tear. Exhaustion slips through the fray and dilates in my body, and I am finally able to feel that I have been steadily trying to outrun something nipping at my heels. I have forgotten about home.
Naturally, the body grows in anxiety and dis-ease, only as a way to call our attention back to ourselves. But we are most afraid of how our bodies talk to us, and the cycle of evasion is vicious. Anxiety tends to push us farther away from ourselves when it is only looking for the owner of its home. Deep soulful care and intimate time spent without distraction is the antidote. The fruit of this practice doesn't grow sweet without genuine effort and engagement. Our relationship with our soul is not a one-and-done exchange; it is a rapport built over time and with sincerity. To nurture the soul, we must know the soul. To know the soul, we must be moving very slowly, tuning our ears for the finespun sounds of its voice. This line from John O'donohue's poem 'for one who is exhausted, a blessing" sent sparks through me: "Learn to linger around someone of ease, who feels they have all the time in the world." My wish is to be so solidly home in each moment there is nowhere else to be.
I lay in my son's bed last night in the comfort of a darkened room, tracing my fingers across his smooth bareback and squeezing his ears. The ears are his favorite spot. He says it feels like his lobes are tiny men getting full-body massages. So, I spend extra time there, watching with a smile as he quiets and stills his little body, to receive the pleasure of the kind hand tending carefully to him. We sang together our favorite song. He made me memorize a song Thich Nhat Hanh would sing to the dying to bring them comfort. The first few lines say: "this body is not mine. I am not caught in this body. I am a life without limits. I was never born; I have never died."
The first time I sang this song to Hugo, he shuttered and smiled. He told me how relieved he was to hear someone tell him he was not trapped in his body. He always felt caught, even telling me once he thought some part of him was in "a prison." Tremendous relief came from being confirmed and allowed to see himself not small and contained but vast and expansive like the oceans and galaxies. When I told him Thay had died, he quietly said, "thank you for his life," as he looked out his window. I asked him what he was grateful for, and he said, "without him, I would have never known I was not just my body." I happened to sing the exact words my young son needed to hear by way of grace.
We live to hear these confirmations spoken to us, to recover what we intuit from some deep well within us. Something inside us knows there is a miracle we are a part of and longs to remember ourselves fully. Not just as these bodies and identities but as the spirit, fluid, unbound, made of love, belonging, and meaning. We are the carriers of these pearls of wisdom that others need to hear. "I am the mouthpiece of God," Ram Dass used to say, joking that he was "a rent a mouth" for the divine.
Our dreams can work in this same way too. They can act as soul recovery. My dream seizing me is waking in me an important question: What have you forgotten? My reoccurring dream is the persistent finger pointing to a place I am deserting, and perhaps, we are each beginning to betray.
There is a feverish pace in the air that unnerves the spirit, and I fear it's only going to get faster. There is a strong current pulling us away from slowness and appreciation. Away from our pain and distress, away from our deeper needs and each other. We are not dealing with or processing what is here. We seek and spin through our life, only to be, sometimes fiercely, turned back toward ourselves. Recovering and reclaiming is not always a comfortable discourse. But it's becoming increasingly clear that my home and how much I inhabit it are the way to lasting peace and contentment. Only to the degree from which I am present to my life will I be nourished and sustained.
I've taken to leaving small pots of water around my kitchen for the ladybugs. I've found them drinking from tiny beads of water on the counter, so I make sure they have plenty now as their pops of color delight me. Getting a ceramic mug from the cabinet, I was struck by joy at the simple act of reaching for the coarse clay cup and filling it with something warm while light cascaded through open windows and tiny ladybugs crawled on the windowsill. I made sure to stop and let the joy in. I closed my eyes and let it get so big inside it filled my fingers and toes. The sounds of my life came crashing together to make one sweet note, and I smiled at the absurd gift of being alive. When reduced to its barest bones, our life is an incredibly abundant and ripe thing, dripping juice from the corners of its mouth into those open to receive it.
Don't let it go by unnoticed. Nothing is nipping at your heels, only you, trying to get back to you.
It's a radical act to stop and feel moments of grace and goodness, to stop long enough to build and linger in the resonance. We must come home, as Mary Oliver said to, "let the soft animal of our body love what it loves." We must teach ourselves how to be at rest. Only once full enough with our joy will it overpower the voices of our fear. Wisdom and discernment are coming to us through dreams and one another. Let us heed this call and deepen the root. It's time to remember, to love all the things that are here, real, and now.
May we listen for all the ways life is speaking to us, recognizing what is uncomfortable and softening into a new way of being. May we become the one who has all the time in the world. May we train ourselves to receive, really receive, what is right in front of us. May we recover what we already know. May we be coherent enough to recognize when having left home and pull ourselves out from the ragging river and onto solid ground. May we notice the joy moving through our body as it reaches for the clay cup to drink something warm in the sun.
thank you.
love,
Sarah
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