The View From My Tree House

I have come to realize that my feet are mysteriously linked to my heart, for,whatever my heart desires my feet are sure to follow.  I do believe they are equally responsible for my wanderlust and gypsy nature, for conjuring adventure against reason.

I leave Denver by way of a 17 ft. u-haul trailer, a wing and a prayer.  My daughter Adrienne once gave me a card that read, ‘when you have come to the end of all you know, there will either be ground beneath your feet or you will be given wings to fly.’

I have come to the end of all I know.

I reduce my belongings by two thirds and now live quite simply in 500 sq. ft, my version of monk’s quarters.  However being a bohemian means that it’s hardly austere.  My abode is a 1920′s tree house with a wood burning stove and a deep soaking tub. I am a half a mile from Lake Washington in Seattle, with a commanding view of Mt. Rainier.  The forest surrounding my house is thick and overgrown, the kind of place where small creatures and children like to hide.  This place is reminiscent of my beloved Ireland and all the things I love most about it, the water, the smell of the air, the winding roads and emerald paths…

There is something inside of me that has always been drawn to the unknown and foreign.  My senses and intuition are heightened in unfamiliar places.  I am challenged to let go of my prescribed sense of self, of all the places and people that give structure and meaning to my world. It lends a perspective that is humbling, stripped of  all personal identity save human.  In a city where I know less than a handful of people I have an anonymity I have never experienced before, and it is both unsettling and liberating.  Where I was once a chapter book, I am now a blank page.

Who is this woman who has left all she has ever known?

Who I have been feels remote, like a lover distanced by time and space. Yet I feel the faintest breath of my former self surface when I bathe, right before I awaken and sometimes when my mind gets still.  She is a chrysalis hanging mid-air.

I knew my heart would ache for my children, that I would miss my family and friends beyond the bearable. I knew that I would be challenged to the marrow to create a new world void of streets as mapped in my mind as the lines on my hands. How was I to know that simply knowing whether to turn right or left was so critical to my sense of confidence and comfort, or that I would feel so skinless?

My saving grace is my ability to surrender to the moment, to allow every thought and feeling to evaporate, to relax into my own vulnerability and emotional pain.  Sitting with uncertainty has become my practice.  Beginner’s mind, I allow myself to be the newly born. I am the ‘observer’ in this new life, the perpetual witness. I have the grace of continual connection to the subtleties of my inner experience, to the richness of solitude.  When I travel alone in foreign places I feel a quickening, a deeper level of expansion and a release from all the limitations of my conditioned mind.  Strangely enough I feel most at home when I am not.

The winged part of my nature loves the freedom of spontaneous movement, of the discovery that comes with the unknown.  It is not easy on my human psyche, on the part that needs to feel anchored.  Anchored to what?  My bold move has awakened the primordial fear of my mortal and impermanent existence, of the transiency of my life.  This is what has been lying deep with my unconscious mind and causing such a tsunami on the surface.  Nothing is permanent.  This is the lesson I learn once more.  But there is beauty in the brief, in the unrepeatable moments that come and go, that compose this delicate weave.  I drink my coffee, watch the morning light caress the surface of the lake, and bow to the mysterious forces that flow through my veins…

I write this post with a certain apprehension.  You see this is the third time that I have written “Every Moment Grace.” The prior two entries written on consecutive days were mistakenly erased.  Ironic.  As the words vanished before my eyes I was confident that I would be able to retrieve them.  Alas, even the technological guru’s were mystified.  Thus I was given another opportunity to bow before the Divine, to relinquish my attachment. To let go. 

Truth:  What is intrinsic to who I am can never be lost.

I have been challenged by spirit all of my life to live what I know to be true.

To trust with absolute faith, that every experience of my life is an act of grace.

Grace is defined as“the freely given unmerited favor and love of God.”I have known this in joy and in sorrow, for grace is truly whatever awakens us to a deeper level of consciousness. Pain, suffering and loss are harbingers of transformation. These experiences take us to the marrow of our being, to the core of our human longing. They inspire and challenge our strength and courage and ultimately reveal that every moment is possessed with meaning and value. They connect us to the present and illuminate our true nature. I have never not known the “unmerited favor and grace of God.  In fact I have felt it most keenly in the most traumatic moments of my life.  I have been made whole and holy by“ill fate.”  

Sacred pain is the “great awakener,”and it is inescapable. It is the light that pierces the darkness of our ignorance. For it connects us to the truth of our circumstance, to the depth of our feeling, to the calling of the soul.  It carries us limp and lost into the sanctity of our interior.  It swiftly removes the superficial and the extraneous. We are left with what is raw and real, intrinsic and eternal.  In our naked emptiness we are liberated.  Pain is grace.  

The greater the adversity the greater the opportunity for transcendence.  When we exhaust our own “known” abilities and resources in times of adversity, we are forced to surrender. This surrender allows us to experience the deeper levels of our nature.  Here we are freed of all resistance, judgement, and effort.  Thus we access the part of ourselves that exceeds the boundaries and limitations of our usual modes of perception. We awaken. Adversity hones our virtue, inspires our innovation and creativity and fosters an endurance and perseverance that defies our own will.  It whispers to our reluctancy and fear… Rise! And so against all odds we do.   

  To live in a state of grace is to be in communion with the Divine. 

  I have awakened to this truth.  Life is grace. It is continually conspiring to choreograph our lives in a way that is awakening and liberating.  We must be willing to surrender our expectations, our attachments, our limiting belief systems, and our incessant need to control our experiences.  How is this done?  By radical acceptance and trust.  Faith in what cannot be known, rationalized or reasoned.  This requires a perceptual lens that sees the world in all its beauty and horror as ultimately benevolent. A desire to willing sacrifice the sovereignty of the ego to the sacred fire of consciousness.  This is a ritual we enact every moment that we wake up.  For in that instance we are no longer possessed by our conditioning, by our thinking minds. We allow the power of our own consciousness to illuminate our experience and define our path.

Remember whatever we bow to becomes our teacher.  Bow, bow deeply.

santidevi