Everything is blooming prolifically in Berkeley. Here it sometimes seems spring never leaves, but the sunlight says otherwise, as the soft golden glow drifts higher and slower in its arc across the sky. Spring sings the Earth alive with reinvigorated promise, everywhere you turn a gift emerges from bud, from branch, from ground. The generosity of enduring love. It is we who are called to find our way back into these sacred cycles.
It’s hard to hold all that this past week contained — from record-breaking heat at both poles, to horrific warfare, to brutal, racist, transphobic, homophobic, anti-choice assaults in many realms — and we’re not meant to. I’m practicing, which means sometimes stumbling, to cultivate loving discernment as much as possible to know when to respond and when to release, when to invest and when to rest.
Rumi's words are a welcome echo in my mind these days:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make any sense.
And this week, I was met by Rilke in a way I never heard before:
“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”
So with that, I have a simple offering today of a poem I wrote this week, inspired by the gentle beckoning of spring toward renewed life, by Rumi and Rilke, and intended with deep care. I'm working on something to serve up more kale for next week, don't worry. ;)
Everything knows how to live
Maybe the spaciousness your lungs most long for are the ways of healing.
Pulsing rhythms of blood rivers flowing through arterial channels,
tender vessels carry the beat of your aliveness inside you,
leading to the open door of your undefended heart.
And in these ways you become the invitation
for another to step into their own heart more fully.
Everything in you knows how to live.
Your breath knows wiser ways beyond anything you think of as “you”.
Maybe your breath breathes you to show you
that the miraculous exists as a biology of ease,
an ecology of surrender, a geography of receptivity,
and as we traverse landscapes of wild wonder within,
gazing inward with the intimacy of body intelligence,
inhale is antidote, exhale is medicine.
Everything in you knows how to live.
Here is your divinity – you and the more than "you".
Maybe your mouth speaks sanctuaries, your hands build altars,
your feet kiss prayers into the ground, your whole being a devotion.
Aliveness unfurls, consciousness forms, breath by breath.
Cycling infinite cellular ripples out to the cosmos, then back again.
A dialogue with the universe that birthed you, abundant in perpetual becoming.
Everything in you knows how to live.
You and the you beyond "you",
the spirit dwelling in your body and the human you're here to be, too.
Thank you for your generous warmth you share with me as you return here each week. I would love to hear from you in the comments. Where are you finding promise and possibility these days?
With heart,
Rachel
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Everything knows how to live