Three Truths and One Wish

1. Truth: The secret to flight, to freedom is to open your heart. For the longest time I’ve been gluing found feathers to my sleeves and in my hair, drawing ink outlines of wings on the skin of my back, buying angel wings intended to be used for Halloween costumes, reading books on the mechanics of flight, imagining that in this way I would eventually learn to fly. Flight–the journey through space, movement through time, escape from fixed ideas and expectations, freedom doesn’t happen this way. Instead I have to relax, let go, leap or float away, open my heart and let it all in, soar in a way that is entirely different than birds do.

2. Truth: Unravelling, being broken can wake you up, give you back your life. When this started to happen to me–trauma, loss, grief, suffering–I imagined myself a perfectly constructed sweater being unravelling loop by loop, stitch by stitch, falling apart, but it turns out it was more like a tangled mess of Christmas lights, usable and workable only after they were unravelled–only then could they be lit up, only then could they color the darkness. I lost so much, only to discover what was true, what was real, what mattered in the ashes of my life after the burning. At times, it felt like dying, but it was only after, shaky and raw, that I felt fully alive, broken open.

3. Truth: Courage and vulnerability are essential, the only way to stay awake. Courage is the ability to do something that scares you, to have strength in the face of pain or grief. To be vulnerable is to be exposed potential harm, to possibly be hurt, wounded. To love what is mortal, to open my heart and be present with whatever arises, to be fully alive, awake and present, to accept impermanence is to be both vulnerable and courageous.

One wish: May we be brave even as we are broken. May we keep our hearts open knowing that we are vulnerable, that we’ll be hurt. May we have the courage to unravel, to fly, to love, to stay awake to life as it comes, whether terrible or tender, beautiful or brutal.

1. Truth: When I am running away from something for too long, I get too tired. Reality, life is asking that I experience some really hard things right now, and I’ve been resisting, avoiding, even rejecting it, but that only causes me more suffering.

2. Truth: When I’m too tired, my choices come from that confusion. I eat less healthy than I should. It’s too hard to put together a salad, peeling and cutting all of the ingredients, so I just eat the lasagne by itself, and I eat more of it than I need. If I’m too tired, it feels easier to buy and eat the gross lemon cookies from the store than to come home and bake the lemon raspberry bread that I’m really hungry for. When I’m too tired, I skip meditation practice because it feels easier to watch TV, to let my mind go rather than focus it.

3. Truth: The only medicine, the remedy is to stay with what is happening, to open my heart to it, to let go and surrender to it, and to get the rest, the nourishment, and the practice I need in order to be strong enough to stay.

One Wish: That I may keep my heart open, find the strength to do so, provide what I need, the care necessary to maintain this awareness, this wakefulness. I wish to remember what Fiona Robyn said:

In this life, with its impermanence and unpredictability and difficult-things-happening, we need all the help we can get. We need to develop habits that steady us, that provide us with nourishment, that remind us of the beauty around us even in the midst of chaos & loss.