No Victim of the Wind

Another cool and early morning up before the sun could greet me.  Many thoughts have I from so many sources taking hold.  Understanding comes in leaps and bounds or not at all for long periods of time, it seems in my little world.  I watched a few leaves let loose from the tree in this morning’s twilight and my being  launched into a stream of feeling.  As the feelings struggled for thoughts to label them, my mind reached back across the span of my life for its recurring themes.  Looking back I realize that at times in my life I have created a thought process in which I was merely a helpless leaf blown in the wind.  While I may at times have identified with the leaf blown helplessly in the wind, the soul in me now knows and begins to truly understand with all the feeling of existence, I am neither now nor have I ever been merely a victim of the wind.  With a lifetime of hard-won lessons I have come to realize that I am not just the leaf but also the wind.  Going deeper within and engaging in further reflection and introspection beyond the realization or identification with being the wind itself,  I realize that I am also the waves of temperatures disruptive…creating the hot or cold convection that generated the impetus behind the wind.

The words upon this page representing the feelings washing over me just now are most difficult to articulate.  These waves of understanding come in the feelings of deep soul knowing that take much time and thought not to understand but to put into words.  Lifetimes of lessons can sometimes download into consciousness in an instant taking one much time to fully taste the sweetness of understanding.  I revel both in the process of tasting understanding but also the process of striving for it.  With my very human mind operating at superficial levels, there can be no understanding at all.  It’s almost as if there is this limited understanding of the mind and this full knowingness of the heart (read soul) that wrestles joyously with much difficulty to “get” what’s trying so hard to come in…or, well, rise to the surface of conscious cognition.  I am momentarily distracted by process as I type these words.  A common construct for me that leaves me hopelessly trapped inside of a box from which nothing can be properly understood.  Exiting procedural thoughts, I go back to the memory that started this string of thoughts and realizations and feel the coolness of the morning swirling around me while my thoughts drift in silent contemplation.

When I watched the leaves as they fell from the tree in the half-light of the morning, I too remembered how many times I have fallen into themes of existence thinking I had no power to soar.  Before the realization of the wind and the source behind its currents, I saw and felt with full measure the experience of falling time and time again, frustrated that I couldn’t hold on to something.  The real problem was that I couldn’t let go of a construct or, rather, a mis-understanding of the framework within which I truly existed.  It’s hard to experience and step back from the experiencing but until you find a way, there is no way to truly understand what is really happening beyond the perceptions environmental psychology has created within the mind.  So, I experienced helplessness at the mercy of the breeze caused by unintentional conditions in my life metaphorically speaking. In so doing, I gave away all of my power to everyone and everything around me never once understanding I was thinking so deeply within the box that I’d be trapped there an eternity if I didn’t do something different.  When repeating the same series of thoughts and actions over and over only ever resulted in more of the same discomfort and disharmony in my life, at some point the thought occurred to me that perhaps certain repeating messages and messengers were placed on my path for a reason.  From there began the realization that I was the one who agreed to take on both messengers and messages.  I learned over much time and through many frustrated and angry tears that I only ever had myself to control and I was never helpless to do that.  But, in my own defense, you can’t know what you don’t know and the only way to know anything is to learn through first-hand experience (or so it seems for me, at least).

At one point in my life in the not-too distant past, I stood alone with all that came before upended in emotional chaos and then came the urge to retreat.   I stepped out of and back from all of my creations, messengers and messages and in mere moments understood the creations were mine even if I did not know how or why.  All of the struggle, the tears, the emotions and pain, disappeared like the ground mist in full morning sunlight.  When I chose to relax and decided to exist neither in the past nor hide out in some worry over the future, the disruptive clash of temperatures (read emotion) stabilized and the winds (read percpetions) no longer blew.   I was thrilled beyond belief and relaxed even further into the stillness of presence.  In the peace created so fully in the absence of my resistance to my own life, I rested upon the land of pure existence and being-ness that  I also created within the whole of my experience.   Just as I would, me being me, I set for myself confirmation and validation in an endless stream of feeling that took years to understand.  And believe me, I endeavor to understand so much more still.  In all of these words and prior experience, I could have saved myself so much time had I learned to align more with a simpler concept/term, a concept/term whose essence hummed humbly and silently in the background of my consciousness patiently awaiting recognition all along.  Stepping fully outside of the box now, understanding much better the whole of my own creations now and trusting implicitly the reasons will be revealed to me by me in perfect time, the words come so clearly now in feeling.  Simply…beautifully…powerfully—I AM.

(c) 2013 Jaie Hart (photo copyright also mine)