Between Peace and Joy

So begins today's entry in Mark Nepo's, The Book of Awakening. It's a lovely entry beginning with the story of a woman who found a dried-up sponge in her purse, took it out to the ocean, submerged it in the water and watched it not only expand and come to life but also witnessed a little fish emerge from the folds of the sponge and swim away to inhabit the gilled palace of its life somewhere amidst the vastness of wave and depth. All that time it had been sleeping between the compressed layers of the sponge. If that isn't a perfect metaphor for awakening then what is...

To look at all the places in our being where things are hard and compressed, where we're sleeping between folds of resistance and shadow, between the known and the known. What riddles we need to solve to stay alive, to stay afloat, to swim always come down to plunging our hearts tenderly into the embodied life we are living, right down to the tiny, finned tremors wanting a voice in the waters of the heart. As  I write I"m reminded of the first time I felt my son swimming inside me...far too early according to the books but I knew that the gentle, shimmerings of movement were his soul parting the waters of the moment to establish his presence in my awareness. As subtle as the minnows that used to glean by my legs in the lake when I was a child, so too did his soul announce itself with joy and delight and the wonder of a world submerged in mystery. What lies between peace and joy, I asked the cards...

Alchemist's Oracle ~ Pleasure and Pain

Pleasure and Pain...key to our humanity, to our hearts and yet I'm convinced that something lies beyond or beneath these two seeming and ornate polarities, each fashioned according to the door they open. And because we are the door, we are also the key...the key being nothing less than our wholeness, our embodied attention articulated around the arising moment...truth as the somatic interface with Now, each according to our own understanding. Mark's exercise for today...

With your eyes closed, meditate on the image of a hardened sponge unfolding like a flower underwater.

As you breathe practice seeing your heart as such a sponge.

The next time you do the dishes, pause, hold the sponge in the water, and feel your heart unfold.


Setting aside all the intellectual explorations and possibilities, this I can do...quietly inhabiting the gilled palace of my own watery depths as I feel my heart expand around the life that is arising in the ordinary astonishment of any given moment.