Unfinished Business

I feel my way through the technology maze and I do pretty well but I could not figure out how to get back to my saved draft of my musings on change. My only options seemed to be delete or publish...so I published it unfinished. Thus, this entry becomes a meditation on Unfinished Business. I was thinking about the challenge of change and the difference between change in the external circumstances of life that one can control vs the kind of change that happens to us and affects our deepest self and is not in our control at all...in fact it controls us with wave upon wave of emotion be it happiness or sadness. There is a piece in all this called resistance too. How much do we allow ourselves to be moved? Do we open our hearts to the depths of grief or do we avoid going there for all we are worth?

There was once a hopelessly idealistic and romantic poet that lived within me. She amassed a mountain of material over the first half of life. She embarked on a journey back to the land and a search for the deepest roots of soul and love. At one point, she became sick with the flu and nearly lost her life when complications developed into heart failure. Perhaps she did lose her life because I no longer seem to feel driven to write. Heart failure for a poet is way more complex than just the physical illness that gets treated with medication and diet changes. It's a failure of spirit as well. Perhaps I just let her die. I simply ran out of words. And I became tired of language, tired of words and verbal description...tired of trying so hard to make myself understood...tired of the internal noise. I craved silence and stillness. A similar thing happened when my Dad died. After taking his cremains out to sea and scattering his ashes, my old joy in sailing died too. I suddenly became prone to seasickness where I once passionately loved the open ocean and the rolling waves. My deepest desire was altered by the void left by the death of my Dad. Suddenly I became a stranger to myself.

Perhaps the challenge of change that happens at our marrow is in allowing ourselves to be temporarily unknown and vulnerable...carried by the waves on a journey toward some unknown becoming. Resistance manifests in holding on tight to our previous definition of ourselves rather than trusting the movement ever onward toward evolution of spirit. I think of my cousin, my friends and family in the throws of cancer...and I pray they greet their changes with less resistance and a deep openness to their vulnerability because it seems to me that embedded in the mystery of change lies a fragrance of something far sweeter than our human minds can conjour and the only path is through feeling.

Is there anything more vulnerable than a baby bird on the cusp of learning to fly?