Look Again

Today has been one of high highs and low lows. At a high point, I was gifted by a teacher with the insight that practicing respect to another is "to look again;" respecting my children is a practice of seeing them more curiously, more clearly, just as they are, and reverencing their needs and wishes. By engaging from a place of trust in who they are, my children and I can move together more collaboratively through life. I was humbled to recognize how much better they are at seeing me than I am at seeing them; even when I am at my worst, my children treat me so very gently with few expectations or demands. They joyfully take me on as a partner in their work, which, as Mary Oliver wrote, leaves me "mostly standing still and learning to be astonished." At the end of the day, my boys and my sweetie-boo realign me to the heart of life: a centerpoint of Being Here Now Contentedly, trusting that we're all doing the best we can, holding space for all we are, which is ever-infinite, despite my thoughtless attempts at times to limit, control, or predict those dimensions. As another wise friend once told me, "there is always enough space." Tonight, I hold the tears and the giggles, the screams and the snuggles, the what-will-be and this-right-now, grateful for this little abundance, these little bodies near mine, and all I have yet to see in them.