While I know that the trials and troubles of life are often what mold us most beautifully. Through the pain and dark night journeys of the soul we emerge into who we really are. But on a glooming Monday morning, back at the work which pays the bills and drains that soul, I have a moment of inspiration. I have spent years doing corporate work in which nothing is ever right or good enough, just as it is. But when I am working on my art, and teaching workshops, everything is just perfect exactly as it is. There is room for all of it, every aspect of it. Nothing is a redo. It's all birth and evolution. Death and reinvention. Composting and rebirth. Like the maple and birch who green and turn and fall and green and turn and fall again and again and again. The work we love is a blessing. The work we don't feels like a curse. Is it worth trying to infuse the difficult work with the essence of devotion to transform it? Or are we really meant to get down to the business of transforming ourselves and getting on with the work that is already devotion, and leave off with all this self made suffering? Is that what's at the core of this path to our hearts -- is it as easy as embracing fully who we really are? I hear the answer in the peace that settles over me. I think of Rumi: "Inside you there is an artist you do not know about... Say yes quickly, if you know, if you've known it from before the beginning of the universe". I return to the work of finding myself in the present moment.
A friend just offered these words of wisdom, garnered from a workshop she attended this weekend with Dr. Reggie Ray (www.dharmaocean.org). Don't push. Trust in whatever arises.
Bending to upright a fork that has fallen sideways in the dishwasher, a chant forms in my hands, in my heart: every moment, every movement is a prayer.
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