Tuning up, tuning in

“Let the opposing voices in your head speak.
They are only finding their part
in a larger, yet-to-be heard song.”

~ Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

This is the 6th year I’m working my way through The Book of Awakening. Fun Fact: It looks like I first embarked upon my journey with Nepo right about the time the world shut down, in March of 2020 (thank you, Goodreads).

No, I don’t read it every day. I did that first year, or close to it, but these days I’d guess I hit at about 60%, jumping in and out throughout the days and weeks.

Yet I would swear to you that never in those first five rounds have I read the entry for a few Saturday’s back.

This one felt entirely new, and while my memory ain’t what it used to be, I really think I have managed to skip over February 22 for five years running.

” Being alive is a paradox, an ongoing mix of things that on the surface don’t always seem to make sense. But voicing what doesn’t seem to make sense helps. It’s like an orchestra tuning up to play together. We have no chance of discovering the fullness of our inner music, if we don’t let the players in our hearts and minds and spirits tune.

Often, confusion is the tension of trying to make sense of things too soon, before enough of the inner players have learned their parts. Often, experience is the way that the heart and mind and spirit practice what they need to play…”

Oh, lord. How many of you have that bit inside of you that gets ahead of itself sometimes? And then that other bit that is so scared of getting ahead of itself, at least publicly, that it shies away from even exploring?

I do. I have that bit.

*Me, lamenting that bit. Also evolving slowly.*

For the longest time I was afraid at a certain level of going too deep in my public writing. The spiritual aspect and the deeply interpersonal aspect of my writing had to stay above some nebulous line, lest I be–gasp–WRONG, and it be out there forever for the world to see.

Somebody–who is well and truly lost to the slights of my memory–talked in some really good book somewhere about our evolution as people, and the evolution of our relationship with the divine, and how hard it can be for writers to write with honesty and integrity because we have to live with the fact that a couple years down the road, if we’re growing at all, we’ll very likely no longer agree with bits and bobs, if not whole swaths, of what we put out there. How we have to trust the reader to not hold us to our words stuck in time, but that they, too, are evolving, and part of that evolution is allowing and celebrating it in us as well. How we should, instead, wear those evolutions as a badge of honor, embrace those bits and bobs as little trophies along the way, reminding us how capable of growth we are, prodding us forward, further up and further in.

*Me, still evolving slowly, while feasting on residuos ordinarios.*

It’s no different from living, really. Particularly any part of life lived out loud. It’s just that we the writers commit to things in what can feel like more permanent and neon ways.

That hit home for me, and for the first time I could see that writing something down isn’t shackling myself to it forever, but capturing a moment in time with as much truth and dignity and love as I can muster at that moment, and then letting it go. A few most excellent authors modeling it all for me helped me to get it, and to aspire to it.

Still, I never was really able to do it.

Something about the election, however, seemed to blow that circuit in my brain, and everything since that day has dropped the guardrails, come out raw and exposed, and given up completely on self-protection. I found myself finally trusting you, the lovely person who chooses for whatever reason to read these words, to allow me the grace of growth, just like I hope the folks closest to me in the real world do. Or, if I’m being honest, I finally stood in a place where it just didn’t matter anymore, and plunged in regardless of what anyone out there might think.

It’s not just here, in my writing, that the circuit breaker burst into flames. Life in the real world has taken a similar turn. If there could be a silver lining to life since November 5th–and there are, many, even in the midst of the carnage–a big one for me is that very explosion. Some extraneous parts of me have been in the way, blocking a genuine living of life and a genuine loving of the whole shebang, and I don’t know if much short of this was ever going to break me through.

And so here we are, all of it naked and hopeful, all of it real and growing. I admit it feels a bit like being on display at the zoo, but I think it’s always felt like that anyway; at least now it’s genuine. I deeply appreciate Mark Nepo’s way of reminding us that life is practice, that we all have a unique and necessary part to play, and that all the warming up and all the listening and the tuning, that all are necessary parts in our participation.

I will say that I’m not a huge fan of all the folks in my life watching me flop around like a fish, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We need some flopping if we’re ever going to get anywhere. And if we’re going to flop, we might as well flop together.

” Isn’t the trail of our relationships the time it takes for the heart to practice its part in the movement we call Love? Isn’t the trail of our honest questions the time it takes for the mind to practice its part in the movement we call Wisdom? Isn’t the trail of our changing beliefs the time it takes for the spirit to practice it’s part in the movement we call God?

And isn’t our trail of Oneness, those brief moments when everything comes together, isn’t this the time it takes for Love and Wisdom and God to bring the common place in us alive?”

So, what the hell, let’s flop like no one’s watching.