Category Archives: Writing

Wishcasting Wednesday

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from Jamie’s post

What is your heart’s wish?

With every beat my heart wishes to experience and manifest more love, but besides more love, its wish is: to write a book, many books, to string words together like prayer flags or mala beads, to live the life of a writer, quiet and solitude and reading and long walks and up early and dogs at my side or curled up at my feet, and thinking and dreaming and imagining, and having long conversations about how and why, and love, love, love, and the tenderhearted wise sadness of being present and of knowing how love goes and how things are and how this works, and grief and letting go and surrender, and friendship, and moving not the way fear makes me move but the way love makes me move, and allowing my “soft animal body to love what it loves,” and meditation and rumination and contemplation, step by step and word by word, being still and listening with my whole heart, being curious and gentle, saying only what is true and helpful and kind, being fearless in that way that gives a gift of the same to others so that they too can notice and manifest their basic goodness, to wholeheartedly live a full life and write about it…this is my heart’s wish.

My heart also wishes for flight, and no matter how often or carefully I explain the laws of physics and the impossibility of a wingless lump of muscle and blood floating on the air, it insists and continues to dream that it will one day wake with wings and fly away. It says that hope is not the thing with feathers at all, love is, and that its capacity for love will be the magic that makes it soar, that unhinges it from this mortal, ground-bound body. And I must admit, kind and gentle reader, sometimes I get caught up in the fire of its faith and find myself almost believing it.

Three Truths and One Wish

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1. Truth: There are places you carry inside, no matter where you go. You feel the temperature and the texture, experience the smell and the sound of these locations, see the colors and shapes of the environment, know the size and mood of the space, real and present in memory and dreams.

For me, some of these places are Amsterdam, my childhood home (not just the house, but the whole town–my church, my school, the field at the end of the road where I lived, the local market, post office, the park, my best friend’s backyard), my grandma’s farm, the cannery I worked in for four summers in a row while I was in high school (trust me, I wish I could rid myself of that one!), my little house in Colorado, the basement of that other house which was the first place Eric and I lived together, and the long stretch of beach from Waldport Bay to Seal Rock.


2. Truth: There are mortal beings that you keep in your heart no matter where you go and even when they are gone. These are the ones who’ve taken up residence in your heart, who you have long, heartfelt, silent conversations with regardless of your physical proximity. You dream about them, long for them, miss them, imagine where they might be, what they might be doing right now when they aren’t with you. And when they become formless, no longer attached to a body, you keep them in your heart, your body, hold them with you, carrying their memory, their love, a precious and wild thing that lives in and through you.

3. Truth: There are practices that will follow you, no matter where you find yourself. These are the things, the habits and the methods that you rely on, that you turn to, that you engage in. These can be helpful and healthy, traditions that sustain you, maintain your sanity and comfort, but they can also be destructive, trapping you in your confusion and suffering. Yesterday I wrote, did yoga, ran with Sam on the beach, meditated, read, and took a long walk with all three of my boys, carrying my camera so I could stop and take pictures of what I noticed, what touched me. These practices are magic, medicine. It wasn’t so long ago that my habitual patterns had a much different flavor, a quality of despair and character of destruction. My teacher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche says, “We are always meditating–constantly placing our minds on an object and becoming familiar with it. But are we getting used to things that will take us forward on the path?”

One wish: That we can practice gentle and kind awareness, that we can view everything we encounter and experience as an opportunity to cultivate a way of being that generates compassion and wisdom, and that we can let go of any habitual patterns that cause suffering.