It’s early, my alarm isn’t set to sound for another hour, and yet I’m awake. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. I feel a wave of anxiety wash over me as I realize that the brain fog I’ve been contending with will continue today, as it does when I’m tired. My emotions start to oscillate from tired to angry: there’s just too much on my to-do list, I’m never going to be able to keep up. My meditation and journaling don’t seem to ease the fretful sensations I’m experiencing. I just want to stop working, I just want some space to not be responsible for my business, household, or the responsibility of carting my daughter around to her activities.
Everything feels like too much.
Then as my daughter crawls out of bed, she groggily asks me for a hug. As she wraps her warm, long body around me she confesses that she misses spending time with me. I remember how sweet these small moments are, and I tell her I’ll make her lunch for her today so she doesn’t have to — she smiles and welcomes the offer that releases some pressure from her morning task list.
I walk outside, and I’m reminded that I’m a microcosm in this enormous world as the symphony of the birds overtakes my agitation. The wisdom of bird song is no longer lost on me, their daily sound resonance of trying to wake us up to who we are reminds me that there is something much greater than my fragile emotional state. I’m flooded with early morning scents. The breeze shifts as the sun moves above the horizon.
All of sudden I feel the hairs on my body rise, bumps all over, as my body remembers how to connect to love. When I remember to listen to the breeze, I find myself, not the part that is pissed off or tired and wants to throw in the towel, but the part that remembers that love is everything, literally everything.
As the reminder surges through my body, I see all the ways that I’m trying to disconnect to the source of everything. I see my impatience, the way I’m emotionally protective by holding my heart securely in the jail of my ribcage. I seal myself off from others by imagining that the discomfort I feel isn’t the fact that I have too much on my plate, it’s that I’ve held my heart hostage in the prison of my pain.
Hiding behind my pain, keeping people an arm’s length away, for what? To feel safe? To protect myself against being seen, to protect myself from being rejected or gossiped about? My partner jokes that I’ve recruited my military and navy seals to protect myself when I’m experiencing a lot. When things feel hard, I call in the troops. I lay a foundation to keep me safe, at least unconsciously.
In truth I’m scared and have learned to hide behind my protectors. The moment I slide into that habit, I lose my connection to truth; I forget to listen to the wilds. I batten down the hatches, and I can no longer hear the reminders from the universe. I can no longer connect to the cosmos.
If I can soften, even the slightest, I will notice that the scents of the earth shift from day to evening and remember that the wildlife spends the evenings attempting to break down the chaos we’ve created on this planet each day. The murmurings of ladybugs gliding through the air, the decomposition of human energy that happens as every flower closes at sunset— All the things that heal us from the ways we have so roughly disconnected from ourselves.
We can miss it all. We can miss the constant invitations to remember.
It’s that simple, but it’s not: we have to not ‘buy’ into all the things that have been constructed to disconnect us from this love. As we all know, the ways that we can disconnect are multiplying at a rate evolution has never experienced before. Is it payback for disregarding the systems of ecology for so long? Is it because we forgot to love and got caught up in chasing the next purchase, the fantasy of living rich, of not being responsible for our impact on this planet and to each other?
Possibly. Maybe these greater forces have had enough of our self-indulgent lifestyles, and they’re going to test how strong we are as a species. Can we resist all the temptations in front of us? Can we resist our egos, technology, money, the romanticization of fame, the next big technological evolution, the desire to move quickly and pretend it’s everyone else’s fault? Or are we going to remember the driving force behind everything — love?
Maybe we all need to spend more time exploring what love means, how it’s constantly showing up, and all the ways we’ve barricaded ourselves from seeing it.
With love
Noelle