Monday Musings: The Miracle of the Moment

The last of the blooming mums, November 2009

"The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive."

— Thich Nhat Hanh

(quote found on the Integrative Expression website for my friend, yoga teacher & rolfer Tammy Limbach)

Homing Instinct

These flying geese marked the end of our gratitude ceremony last Sunday.

I looked at these geese with longing. All of them together. Finding their place in the group, singing and calling to keep everyone close. All knowing by instinct the way home.

In some ways we are like these geese — traveling in a direction but not yet landed.

I am reminded of one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, "Wild Geese."

 You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

We are moving today. And I am feeling a bit umoored by our move.

We do have a landing spot for the next 10 months. A really lovely place to call home, actually.

But we are not yet certain where our final destination will be. (Stay in Wisconsin? Or be like these geese and venture farther south?)

I want the certainty of these geese, that sense of inner compass.

Yet I know that we find the destination by being on the journey.

For now, it is enough that we are taking flight into our future.

In our new backyard, we have a water channel that leads to a lake. We saw a school of geese swimming by the other day and the droppings on the pier to show that they sometimes stop on land.

I hoping the geese will be around for a while after we move in.

They will serve as a reminder to trust my instincts and know that we will indeed "find our place in the family of things."

Today, I fly away from this nest we've been in for seven years.

But I will watch for the geese as I await the calling to take flight again and head home.

Flowering Fridays: In Thanksgiving

The last of the asters blooming in the meadow

Last weekend, we said our thanks and our goodbyes to the land that has been our home for the past seven years.

We built a fire in our fire pit and wrote down anything we wanted to release as we made this move. I wrote down that I wanted to release my fear of the future and my stuckness. Grace drew a tree and wrote, "I'd like to release my fear." And Michael wrote that wanted to release his guilt.

Then we burned our paper in the fire.

We finally buried Bentley's ashes and shared our favorite memories about our beloved boxer boy.

And then we walked around the yard and thanked it for the many gifts it has given us.

View from Happy Corner of the farmland behind our house

We gave thanks to "Happy Corner" for its beautiful view, for the memory of Mr. Pheasant coming to squawk on the tree stump there, for its bouyant energy that led Grace as a young child to run there and twirl and sing with joyful abandon. (Hence, its name.)

Hollyhock seedpod in our garden

We gave thanks to our garden for the food, the bountiful flowers and many lovely dinners in the gazebo.

We gave thanks to the farmland behind our yard, for the cornfield and the views of the hillside.

We gave thanks for Grace's secret spot....

...and for her special lookout tree.

We thanked Mother Willow for her shade, for dinners under her branches and her strength (still standing despite being twice struck by lightning and half as big as she was when we moved in).

 Wild onion seed head, our garden

We gave thanks for the animal friends who visit, from the birds, deer and turkeys to the 13-lined ground squirrel, tree frogs and chipmunks.

And, last but not least, I gave thanks to all the flowers who have inhabited the yard, who have allowed me the gift of taking their picture, and who have taught me so very much about life, love, trust and surrender.

Witnessing the flowers has been a source of strength for me while I make this transition. And from their wisdom I am finding that I can move beyond my fear of what's ahead to trust in the unfolding and the blooms that are sure to come.

We move on Saturday, and while I am excited about our new place, I will miss this place we've called home.

In my heart, I carry the seeds of these precious memories and the gratitude for all I've learned and experience within this little patch of earth.

Tell me, what in your life do you give thanks for this week?

P.S. I've been posting a bunch of photos about this transition on my Facebook page. (Are we friends yet? If not, please friend me!) You can view a retrospective of yard photos here, a collection of some of my favorite turkey photos here (I think I might miss them the most of all), some photos of our home makeover here and some photos of our new place here.

 ************* 

Flowering Fridays is a weekly look at flowers through the lens of what they might teach us about flowering fully in our life. Past editions are here.