Are you diving deeply?

Living Deep

“…Let us live deep enough

till there is only one direction

and slow enough till there is only

the beginning of time

and loud enough in our hearts

till there is no need to speak…”

                                        Mark Nepo

                                        From: Earth Prayer

“Give me the candle of you Spirit, O God.

As I go down into the deep of my own being.

Show me the hidden things.

Take me down to the spring of my life, and tell me my nature and my name.

Give me the freedom to grow so that I may become my true self---the fulfillment

of the seed which you planted in me at my making.

Out of the deep I cry unto thee, O God.  Amen

                                        Prayer

                                        Journey into Wholeness

          In the opening lines of On Walden Pond, Thoreau wrote, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life…”  I confess that I didn’t make it all the way through On Walden Pond, but I loved the richness with which he wrote.  Living deeply and ‘sucking out all the marrow’ is a good way to describe living consciously.  It assumes that one is not simply skimming through one’s days, but is living them close to the bone, paying attention to details.  When I think of all the days that I have wasted by sailing on the surface, I cringe.  It’s easy to do, certainly easier than diving down to discover ‘the spring of my life.’  Especially when one is marking time on somebody else’s clock, being deeply involved is difficult…but not impossible. 

          Even when we are doing something ‘un-sexy,’ like the laundry or cleaning the house, we can pay attention and notice what is in our hands and the smell of the laundry detergent and the softener.  We can remember where we last wore this pair of pants or when we bought this shirt.  We can listen to the water running into the bucket and ponder its route to get to our faucet.  We can notice how the floor shines when we run the mop over it and feel the muscles we are using as we push it forward and pull it back.  We can listen to the hum of the vacuum cleaner and notice how much we love the silence when we turn it off.  We can see how clear the mirror is when we wipe off all the little droplets that have splashed on it.  At the end of the day, we will be able to remember exactly what we have done with our precious minutes and hours and feel pleasantly tired. 

          Our lives happen in these small undertakings.  It is not the great vacations, or that time we saw elephants in Kenya or the running of the bulls in Barcelona, that our lives happen.  Life exists in the mundane, everyday moments that we breathe in, breathe out.  If we are not paying attention to these, we may be missing our lives entirely.

                                        Keeping the faith,

                                        Jane