Bravest Heart,
There’s only one life we get to call our own. Only one thread among the basket of twine we get to pull and weave ourselves with, only one tool we get to cleave through the thicket, only one deep palm crease we get to call our lifeline. There’s only one life we get to call your own and it takes a certain kind of fierceness to live it.
For all the things that never came to be and all the things that came without consent; this life right here is the one life we get to call ours.
For all the questions we might never get to answer, all the things we might never get to make peace with, all the parallel lives that pull us from the sidelines; this one life is our life.
They say that it is our unlived life that hurts us the most. The life that never got its heart and lungs is the one that haunts us with its should be’s and could have been’s.
We tend to live in the reverberations of our life and not sound’s source which can sometimes feel too much or too mundane to bear.
And although we may do wondrous things with this one life; we get to reshape it many times, threading new colors, thickening it, offering it to others…we don’t get to escape this one and we certainly can’t worry ourselves into a new one.
Our work here is to make this one our own by seeing and accepting it all.
We must all submerge our hands into the milky water full of rags and pull up the red cloth that is our life and reclaim it as our own, no matter its condition.
That is why grief for what never came to be and surrender for what we wish would come is so powerful… it allows us to bury what’s unlived.
Sometimes allowing our life to be our own, for all of it to be pulled into the present moment is our bravest act. It allows us to reconcile parts that we have split off in order to be protected by the egoic mind.
Being with what is, the mess, the complexity, the beauty, the grief, the disconnect, solidifies the line of our life so that it doesn’t blur between what is source-filled reality and the blurred reverberations of false protection.
Holding all in a non-judgmental awareness deepens the ink we get to write our stories from, giving us the potency to make peace with the past, to speak our needs, to honor our boundaries, and welcome home all that has been faded by fear.
We don’t stop dreaming or following our inspired ambitions - but we do these things in a stream that flows with reality, not against it.
We long for goodness, knowing that our potential lives in the same place as our limitations and not outside it in some boundless space that is ‘better’ than here. Being able to hold these polarities certainly gives us a greater sense of abundance. Lack comes from the idea that we don’t already have everything we need to heal, grow and live fully, and it is grown out our binary thoughts that judge our life as good or bad, fulfilling or purposeless…
We tend to be like acorns who believe they first need to become Spruce in order to become a tree.
Whereas if we looked at ourselves and trusted who we are and what we are – we’d become everything our deepest Self has always wanted us to be.
We don’t get to live our maybe’s – our could have been’s – or our tomorrow’s - not even our longings possess flesh in this moment. In other words, we only get to live the yarn in our hand, not the loose wool gathered in the basket.
There’s only one life we get to call our own. Only one thread among the basket of twine we get to pull and weave ourselves with, only one tool we get to cleave through the thicket, only one deep palm crease we get to call our lifeline. There’s only one life we get to call your own and it takes a certain kind of fierceness to live it.
Question: From the meditation, what is the hardest thing to hold in your ‘basket’?
I’ll add mine in the comments…see you there!
