Buoyant

Sometimes you watch through the glass. Six chickens eat a cucuzza that sat in your fridge for weeks. Of these six only one stays when you open the door.

They are no longer chicks. Not yet chickens. You wonder at the definition of a fledgling though you know this does not fit. You know that yesterday you wrote from a space of negativity. You forgot the joy at the possibility of the peanut butter fruit cuttings. You forgot the three hundred and fifty guava seeds. You forgot that your thoughts create your reality.

You did not yet know that you had landed yet another client. 

It would be interesting to examine the how and why of my switching between first and second person. Could this be the watcher and the watched? The divine and the egoic mind? The small s self and the capital letter Self?

It is interesting how quickly the mind can shift, how attuned mine is to going to the space where things do not work in the way I want them to. This is especially humorous when I consider that I am not exactly sure how I would like them to work.

For many years I would write of being on the inside looking out. I remember sitting in the pedestrian mall in Iowa City. Bars and college kids. I was of college age. It was as if I was watching a story I had no control over. I would write as though the literal wall of glass stood between me and what was next figuratively. I could see the other side. I could see people walking through life with what seemed a confidence that I could only fake.

Last night, I realized that some of my own resentments come as a result of watching people I know are not confident deep down inside act as though they are. The problem with this, other than blame, when I look within to how this exists inside of me, is that the mind is trying to tell the body something that is not true.

The body has become conditioned to live with worry, with anxiety, with the comfort of being overwhelmed. To step through the glass would be an abandonment of the body. This body wants to protect the mind and sees unknown territory as dangerous. 

All my life I have tried to solve the inner workings of the brain with the same section of the brain that created the problem. To solve worry with worry. To solve the feeling of being overwhelmed by taking on more.

At one point, I was able to go to others, and I still go to others, but in these last few months I have realized the importance of letting the body retrain the mind, ridding the body first of those emotions that are used to wading, that know this is a cesspool, but the cesspool has enough lift to keep me afloat, and who knows just how buoyant those crystal blue waters of presence over yonder might be.

What does any of this have to do with what I might best describe as those teenaged chickens who eat the seeds of cucuzza outside my back door? 

Let me think for a moment. Let me consider the way they eat without knowing that I am watching, and then, when they see me, they continue to eat and make no bones about me because they know that glass divides us. As soon as the door opens, the possibility of danger exists.

We are getting somewhere here. The word glimpse seems appropriate.

I step forth. In the forest of green outside my window there is contentment. There is presence. There is beauty. Always. Life revolves around life. Bugs eat bugs and are eaten by birds. Grasshoppers the size of dominoes sometimes surprise me. 

The question becomes one of how to prune what does not serve. Moreso, how to do this without worry or fear, how to see everything as a beginning.

I am the chicken that still stands. I am the chicken that knows sustenance is safe, that knows that these cucuzza seeds are a gift from the heavens, that all of my experiences are gifts, that everything I encounter and the thoughts that I have are opportunities to love better. 

Ultimately, what is known is this, to be separated from one thing is to be separated from everything.