...getting stopped by a slow train at the end of a long day, feeling anxious to finally arrive home and rest...then looking up into the majesty of a black line of geese floating on ribbons of pale blue and pink clouds, which I would have missed if I had kept going.
...speeding along, driving through the internal and external traffic patterns that distract and numb me from true attention...then glancing over at just the right moment to see a lone deer nibbling grass in a quiet field behind the trees.
...noticing the slender girl just entering her womanhood curled up in the arms of a tall, thin boy at the bus stop and wondering fearfully to myself what possessive power he exerts on her...then understanding that their limbs construct a tender Pieta, that their posture is a prayerful icon, that her weariness and his protectiveness are sacred in their palpable humanity.
...seeing billows of smog trailing from the garbage truck making its early rounds, loathing its ephemeral poison and even more my own habits that keep me complicit in the planet's destruction...then marveling at the mystical beauty of the smoke's suspension in air, the refreshment of cool morning breezes, the wonder that anything exists at all.
...looking across the dinner table and realizing I will never fully know the depths of the one I made my life partner, nor will he entirely know mine...then looking into his eyes and feeling the ebb and flow of love's waters on our separate shores, remembering that the multitudes are not what we contain, but what we share - what contain us.
...watching work into which I have poured my heart and hope be put to rest or forgotten, tasting labor's bitter futility...then discovering the tools to make something new from the embers of my inspiration and seeing that it is all part of collective evolution.
...realizing that life's labyrinthine pathways lead to the same places no matter how far I think I have come, that progress is cyclical, that many have been where I am and will be where I am going...then sighing at the gift of claiming my particular part, choosing it, and trusting the Greater Work unfolding in and as All Things.
...gazing into my son's eyes and feeling the familiar terror that I will miss significant stretches of his life, that he will have such heavy burdens to bear with the other children left to heal what is harmed, that I cannot protect him from his fate...then being filled with awe by the force of his spirit, the steadiness of his destiny, his tenderness to my fear, his directive toward connection, his innate knowledge of a world I will never see.
...surrendering to today's dark sleep full of unresolved questions and incomplete offerings...then rising tomorrow as something new to begin my work again.
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