Touching What Is

Today's entry from Mark Nepo's, The Book of Awakening, focuses on the embodiment that results from responding to the still, small voice within...what I have come to know as 'the call to prayer'. He shares the story of a young divinity student who was stricken with a bout of diptheria that left him paralyzed and extremely weakened and how from somewhere deep within him came the surprising voice calling him to dance. With a lot of difficulty he quit divinity school and began to dance and slowly and miraculously he began to gain the use of his legs again and went on to become of the fathers of modern dance, Ted Shawn. Such a wonderful expression of Dance as divinity lived.

When I read stories like this I'm reminded again and again of the power and grace that comes from listening, from being still enough to catch that small whispered wisdom-voice that contains within it seeds of our embodiment, of the glorious potential of our lived experience. The voice is inescapable but the rising up to meet it and receive it is where the choice lies. Like each of us I have my own relationship with the God within...sometimes I listen, sometimes I ignore, sometimes I flip it the bird and send it packing, sometimes I sit with it. Whatever my response it continues to speak to me, loyal creature that it is, devoted to my unfolding. Each time I allow it an embodied breath in my being I am reborn ever so slightly anew, I take shape around possibility rather than premise, dancing with God rather than 'thinking about' dancing with God.

What is beneath that impulse is the loam of spaciousness...and the willingness to dive deeply into embodiment. It's not always easy when the voice feels uncomfortable and Mark talks about it as 'the secret of loving whatever is in the way until it ceases to become an obstacle.' I experience it as touching what is. I pulled two cards today, hearing the call and embodying it...

Plant Ally Cards ~ Lumina Tarot

These two cards have a perfectly gritty realism when seen through the lens of this exercise...Shadows and the Five of Cups. What do I do when it's the Shadow making the call to prayer? I do what I always do when any sacred body comes calling...bow first and then decided how I feel.

In this instance what I feel moved to do is sit down beside it, take the position of witness, the corvid in the Five of Cups. He's holding in his beak a red thread that is entwined around the stem of each of the cups...the good experiences linked with the challenging ones. And he's holding it in such a way that one could see him as wanting to untie it, to loosen the thread that holds them together, that allows for perspective, inclusion.

The Shadows card, from Lisa McCoughlin's Plant Ally deck, gives a feeling of the womb, of a cave and it asks us to shed the light of awareness on the triggers of our lives. It is represented by the plant Wall Pennywort whose latin name is umbilicus rupestris. Rupestris is latin for 'lives on the cliffs or rocks'. Seeing the figure curled up in the fetal position in a womb-like shape beneath the earth brings to mind images of gestation and germination in the loam. Live with integrity, the card calls us to do, embrace all aspects of your being.

That's a tall order but I can begin somatically...taking up a position close to the earth similar to that of the figure in the card and then gradually unfold feeling what it's like in my body to do so and watching where the breath goes with it. What cups does it flow towards naturally, the full ones or the empty ones? I can allow them all in,  say Yes to them with my whole being, the empty and the full, in this way giving my interest and attention, which is to say my love, to all parts of my life. I can respond to their call to prayer.