Big, Ugly, Brown Dumster

I know. Spring is just another turn of the four seasons.  People shed their clothes. Birds return with their sweet sound.  Snow packs up its chilly presence and moves on. Curtains and windows are kept open longer.  It seems like there are more hours in a day.

But this spring seems to be opening me up more.  Or it’s coming at a time when I’m letting myself be open.  I finally seem to be shedding my fears.  At last my music-making is feeling more second nature.  I see what is there for me, not so much what I’m missing.  Sharing myself feels less a drain of my energy and more restoring.  

This spring I’ve noticed the buds on trees opening up into leaves. Apple blossoms go from looking like rose buds, to small white flowers.   Small changes feel significant this spring. Am I getting old?  Is Thoreau finally getting to me? Or am I finally getting young?

The following, I found in a book by John O'Donohue, Anam ara - A Book of Celtic Wisdom.

You should belong first in your interiority.  If you belong there, and if you are in rhythm with yourself and connected to that deep, unique souce within, then you will never be vulnerable when your outside belonging is qulified, relativized, or taken away.  You will still be able to stand on your own ground, the ground of your soul, where you are not a tenant, where you are at home.  Your interiority is the ground from which nobody can distance, exclude or exile you.  This is your treasure.

I don’t have to rush.  I can stop, as long as I want, and look at the colors of the tulips.  But, it isn’t just the time I have to notice. It’s a shift in my heart.  I’m letting in.  I’m not pushing away joy and contentment anymore.  

Before, when I felt a close call with death (or imagined fear of danger), I’d look it in the face and say, “Take me, I don’t care.”  Now, I think, “Let me step aside, so I’m not in your path of destruction.”

I don’t know why I’m trying to explain this. Maybe it’s my attempt to describe a feeling as powerful as seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. As moving as being at the birth of a baby. As compelling as falling in love for the first time. 

I could look up a hundred psychological terms to label this.  But, I don’t want to, it’s mine. I don’t want a term to simplifying something only my soul can feel. It doesn’t need to be sized, shaped or weighed. 

Yesterday, I wanted to put color on the side of a big, ugly, brown dumpster, sitting by the side of the road.  I asked D’Real if he wanted to do it with me.  “Yeah,” he said, “It will be making something better for everyone’s to see.”  He thought of using chalk. Perfect. “The rain will wash it off,” he decided.

People walking by stopped and asked, “Why are you doing that?”  and “Isn’t that illegal?”  “Can I do that,too?”  We interacted with several people we wouldn’t have noticed, otherwise.  And they probably wouldn’t have played with us, if they didn’t need to create for the fun of it. Or, it could be a beginning for them, too.

Tanya, Store-Owner in Ann Arbor,
Decides to fun, too)

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  Henry D. Thoreau