by ingrid on March 9, 2009
“I’m nobody. Are you? Are you nobody too?” asks Emily Dickinson in one of her poems. “Oh, yes!” I say, relaxing into oneness. Have I gone off the deep end? I hope so! Off the deep end and into the Ocean of Belonging. I’ve been thinking a lot about the ocean as a metaphor for all that holds us. I’ve been relaxing into seeing myself as nothing more or less than a drop in that ocean. I am in this ocean, and it is in me. And so are you. We are all drops in this ocean. It is the ocean of oneness /love /God /belonging. In this ocean we are all equally held. Nobody needs to be more special or shiny than the other. We just are. (Don’t tell Barney the big purple dinosaur.) Lately I’ve been enjoying my drop-in-the-oceanness. I’ve been enjoying my smallness.
Grace
Slips in ~
Sunrise,
Lightness,
A cleansing wave ~
When I
Remember
I am
Held.
On the off chance that you would find this thought healing, I offer it to you: We are drops in the ocean, and we are enough. In her poem, Emily goes on to talk about frogs making a lot of noise in a bog. Sometimes I think the pressure of having a presence on the web, of needing to let people know who I am and what I do feels a bit like the noisy frogs. Today I just want to say, “I’m nobody. Are you? Are you nobody too?”
by ingrid on January 30, 2009
When Winter drains the summer from our lawn,
my eye turns to within the house, seeking the cheer of color and light.
Here a geranium leans into the sun…
I supplement with candle light, party streamers & store-bought bouquets….
and I am thankful for the color on the walls….
by ingrid on January 27, 2009
My daughter Rose and I met up with my parents for a chilly walk on Lucy Vincent Sunday afternoon. At the entrance to the beach, we met an acquaintance who had recently lost his wife to cancer. “May I join you?” he asked, “I’m lonely.” Something about his honesty put us all at ease. He said his wife had painted many pictures of this beach, and that he was surrounded by her art and jealous of the pieces that were sold. It was as if he still longed to gather every last fragment of her and hold them near. My heart ached a little, and opened.
He asked what I had been doing. “Plodding along,” I said, instantly kicking myself. Plodding along?! What is that? This man would have understood better than many how I had felt myself coming into the winter season with an intense need for pleasure and for rest. He would have understood my excitement at reading that the word “SAVOR” is from the Latin root for wisdom.
That is what I mean to do: to savor the slow and smokey winter sweetness of my days- to look mindfully at the details with gratitude and appreciation and perhaps even a poet’s eye; to breathe of them whole-heartedly; to drink them fully; to hold my family close; to practice beauty- the love of it if not the manufacture.
At home, the door, simple objects, all took on a new luminosity.
And the sun reached in across a kitchen counter, illuminating our abundance: onions, coffee, winter squash…
by ingrid on January 7, 2009
I often sign my correspondence, “Love, Joy, and A Thousand Daily Blessings”. This appeals to me instinctively and poetically, although I’ve never known quite why. The other morning I noticed that I seemed to breathe once every eight seconds- in for four, and out for four. This was very self-conscious, and for that reason probably not true for the times I am less aware that I am breathing at all. But I applied this count to minutes and hours, and soon realized that I breathed more than ten thousand times a day. In which case, I concluded, I am blessed ten thousand times daily just by living.
On top of this, I was aware of other blessings: the sun rising, my loved ones, hot water flowing free from the tap, the fragrance of my shampoo, a warm sweater, raspberries and coffee, a humorous exchange with my husband, moments to wonder at the beauty of my children- and that was just in the first hour!
The next morning I awoke with the awareness that this day would, in all likelihood, contain ten thousand daily blessings, in addition to all the other blessings I was aware enough to notice. And the day stretched out warm, light, and full of possibility.
Love, Joy, and Ten thousand daily blessings, Ingrid
