Day of Delirium #339 - The Rabbit and the Garden

"The real voyage of discovery

consists not in seeking new landscapes

but in having new eyes."

~ Marcel Proust

In the movie PHENOMENON, John Travolta's character has done everything he can think of to keep this pesky rabbit out of his garden. He's even put in fencing that goes three feet underground, and still everything he plants is nibbled through.

Suddenly one night he wakes and realizes he's been going about this all wrong. In the moonlight, he quietly goes to his garden and opens the gate, then sits on his porch and waits.

To his surprise, as he begins to fall asleep, the rabbit scurries out the gate. While he'd been trying to keep it out, the rabbit was trapped in his garden, and he was inadvertently keeping it in.

How often do we barricade and fence up our lives against hurt and loss, thinking we're keeping the painful things out, when they're already trapped inside us eating at our roots, and what we really need to do is to open the gate and let them out?

• Center yourself, and consider what you are currently trying to keep out of your heart. It might be a fear of what's to be, or a memory of what has been, or the truth of a situation you are living right now.

• Close your eyes and open the gate to your heart and wait. Breathe and wait.

• Breathe slowly and give the rabbit a chance to leave your garden.

-- Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Day of Delirium #338 - The Necessary Privilege

Sorry that I have only been reposting items from The Book of Awakening lately. I've been very busy at work and these items have been one of the few distractions that speak to me and that I want to share so they can speak to you.

"Not to feel is to stop the heart from breathing."

So often, we war against sadness as if it were an unwanted germ, and pine after happiness as if it were some promised Eden, whose gate is keyed to the one secret flaw we need to rectify in order to be worthy. Even our Constitution attempts to rescue us from the hard full journey of individuation, ensuring what no government can ensure, the soul's contentment; suggesting that happiness is our inalienable right, while implying that to experience sadness leaves us somehow deprived.

Yet it is no mistake that to suffer means to feel keenly. For to feel deeply and precisely with full awareness is what opens us to both joy and sorrow. It is the capacity to feel keenly that reveals the meaning in our experiences.

If you are thirsty, you can't dip your face to the stream and say, "I'll only drink the hydrogen and not the oxygen." If you remove one from the other, the water cannot remain water. The life of feeling is no different. We cannot drink only of happiness or sorrow and have life remain life.

The truth is, that as the lungs make use of the air we breathe, the heart makes use of the things we experience. Thus, to be alive is to feel. This is our right. To feel keenly is our necessary privilege.

• Recall your most recent moment of happiness and what opened you to it.

• Recall your most recent moment of sadness and what opened you to that.

• Let each quiet breath bring these feelings together the way rivers merge into a sea.

• Without trying to keep them separate, feel your happiness and sorrow merge in the depth of your being.

~~~~

The Book of Awakening ~ Mark Nepo 

Day of Delirium #337 - The Chick Being Born

I was a little thrown by this entry in my daily devotional book but something nagged at me to post it. Even though it sounds a little gross, it is needed information and I feel like there are people who need these words right now. 

"Every crack is also an opening."

When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world.

Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment - growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking - the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn't die, but falls into the world.

The lesson is profound. Transformation always involves the falling away of things we have relied on, and we are left with a feeling that the world as we know it is coming to an end, because it is.

Yet the chick offers us the wisdom that the way to be born while still alive is to eat our own shell. When faced with great change - in self, in relationship, in our sense of calling - we somehow must take in all that has enclosed us, nurtured us, so when the new life is upon us, the old is within us.

-- Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

-- Because Nice Matters.