The Impossibility of Knowing

I embrace my elusive nature.

There are times when I have felt understood and helped others feel understood. But these moments are impermanent, and flit away quickly under fingertips. To be known is a gift, but to really know someone is to see their eternally changing nature. To watch them move and shift with the light, and accept that for what it is. Them for what they are, and are not in any given moment.

I have been guilty of seeking to define and see clearly with a direct gaze. By staring, I have hoped to illuminate the truths I so desperately sought. In myself and in others. But the eyes play tricks, and these days I need reading glasses. I am finding that it is only by looking away that knowing comes to me, lands in the depth of my gut as a moving, breathing arrival.

As human beings we like contracts, structures. The scribing of paperwork and a hammer and nail help us believe that there is something still and unchanging in this world. Helps us cling to the river washed stones of security and certainty. We try to write ourselves into each other's stories, tack ourselves to the living tree of someone else's existence. We also do it to ourselves; pinning ourselves up against some previously held reality. If we succeed, we are killers, crushing the life out of the magical element of what we are. More often than not though we come to see that the real person has left, leaving only an earthly husk, dust in our hands.

I aspire to look away more often, let my hands fall from your shoulders and mine. Breathe out. It is hard to look away from such beauty, but truthfully we can only have what we let go of. And that is a sometimes painful process of unhooking and unhinging ourselves from objectivity and guarantees. From promises that could not be kept. Again and again, over a lifetime.
Hold me, but not still.

Risk

About a year and a half ago, I posted a 'crowd-sourcing' question on Facebook. Something to the effect of "wisdom on risk taking - go." I remember it clearly and some of the answers that came, and not because I tend to remember everything I post. I remember it because I was in the process of taking a real risk. One that was emotional, exciting and scary. And although the initial result of that risk was hands down balls out positive, the ramifications of what ensued have embroiled me in a yearlong process of loss, ambiguity and disappointment. And have caused other people pain and strife, I have no doubt.

Now I return to this idea of risk. I have shied away from it a lot this past year, but at times I have expressed my truth, been more brave than at any other time in my life. I have risked seeming like a fool, and in retrospect perhaps that has been the result from a certain perspective.

I am an innately cheeky and sometimes irreverent person. I enjoy whimsical banter, but I am also serious and tend towards deep thinking and profound idealism. And I have spent a lifetime feeling that some of the aspects who I am are, well...'a bit much',  in addition to a fairly healthy dose of 'not enough'. As a result I moderate myself, from being too silly, or too serious and quiet, too sad or too brazenly gleeful, especially in the company of strangers. For the most part, it's the impish part of me that hides away - most often with people I know less well, and more so when there is something at stake - something of the ego to be lost or cracked into. I unfold slowly, though in some cases I transcend that tendency.

I work with people for a living, and while I feel one of my gifts is authenticity, I also know there is a part of me that needs to chink the mortar and limit the doorways people have to who I am. I need to stand up in the watchtower and see who's coming, so I can decide whether or not to let you in. If I find myself being too funny, or too serious - a bit much - I might withdraw. If I inadvertently drew you in too quickly then thought better of it this withdrawal is a way that I avoid a painful conversation later. It gives me some time to regroup and reassess, but it is also a form of pre-emptive cowardice. I am as afraid of disappointing as I am of being disappointed.

So what if I was just myself, whatever that means at any given moment? Would the right people just show up and the wrong ones steer clear? And what about that...I expend energy tamping down the fire of who I am, assuming that I am right about who is 'right' and who is 'wrong'. Perhaps my impressions are incorrect.

What if the real risk is the one that I have been so energetically engaged in? I have risked being a smaller version of who I am in order to exert some imagined control over the outcome of my relationships. Perhaps the real measure of who is right and wrong flows organically from all of us simply being ourselves, moved towards or away from each other by the grace of authenticity.

What the Heart Knows

Take a seat on this blustery March day.
Ink the screen with thoughts alone, black on white, the illusion of words made real by their emotional bones. These scripted shapes have weight and truth when infused with the light of feeling. They are steeped in it.
I have discovered, or am discovering that when the mind has found no explanation or solution to life's mysteries, it is time to give up thinking. All the questions will continue to go unanswered because the answers are not sitting out in plain sight, they are not earthly perhaps. They cannot be grasped, or held at this time.

So it is up to the heart to understand, as it did in the beginning. In every beginning I have ever known. I knew what was up and what was happening long before the mind got hold of it, and will continue in this way. I knew there was a wait in store that could span lifetimes. Knowing that the heart acknowledges no timeline and has a wild tolerance for ambiguity. Trusts the territory where reason and logic have no hold, where intuition and the body's wisdom are paramount. The only truth tellers.
Now to learn to listen.
Hold off on conclusion, 'understanding' and any certainty that seeks to inhabit a physical form.
I knew all this in childhood, before that. I was infused with a connection to what is light and good. That despite everything, and all that was to come, all would be well. I knew too that there would be darkness.
Now I need to listen more carefully at the beginnings, and honour what I know to be true, despite the internal or external pressures otherwise. And always be open to getting it wrong.

The Sound of Otter Feet on Wet Pavement

The darkness of a spring rain night in an oceanside city. For a city it's a modest one, short on skyscrapers, long on driftwood strewn beaches and greenery. And pinkery for that matter. Spring was upon us in February. Blossoms and all. The air is soft, and damp.
There is a final walk of the night for those of us who live with dogs, a short trip around a block or two, finding grassy sidelines, a last bit of sniffery to be had. The humans as well get to breathe some of the outside air before bedtime.
We live beside the water here, from my door less than a minute trip to the salty edge of things. The wood of the trestle bridge and pavement were freshly damp this evening. Emerging from one side of the trail came the humpbacked twosome, in the dim light hard to see. Cats? Coons?
Neither. The strange slapping of compact webbed feet on manmade substrate, a loping and slightly lopsided gait showed them up for who they were. Heads raised, always. Optimistic. River Otters in transit, looking for better fisheries, or a bankside home to hole up in. Perhaps this was their pre-bedtime stroll. They looked to me and the dog for a moment before completing their sidewalk crossing and we looked back, saying nothing.
Before this evening's dark rainy dog walk, I have never known the sound of otter feet hitting wet pavement. And in the smallest ways I am stretched by it, welcomed into some tiny but significant secret that I did not even know existed.