Embracing Life

Embracing Life

Today, this day, I can embrace 

every abundance 

large and small

thanks to the things

I've shed.

Like leaves falling one at a time

from an autumn tree, 

I have walked through 

this life shedding,

as each season desired,

what no longer made sense

for me to carry.

My burdens growing lighter 

with each passing year.

Why carry hurts 

and if-onlies?

Who needs 

 to strap bitterness

to her back and carry it around

until she is crushed 

from the weight of it?

Not the me, 

 I am in this moment.

I no longer keep walking 

into the same wall,

receiving the same wounds. 

I no longer loop around and around

until I'm dizzy from

getting nowhere.

I can walk with my back straight,

my neck craned to get a glimpse

of what adventure is around

the next corner.

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

Rock My World

Stone is the face of patience.       

Mary Oliver 

Even rocks have stories to tell,

deep old stories of time passing through eons, 

slow and fast moving water 

shape the stones over millennia. 

I have such a stone, ancient, from a creek bed in the Colorado Rockies. 

It fills my whole hand with its weightiness. 

Hefty. It feels hefty.

The color of dusky charcoal with white threadlike veins running around it,

tracing the paths of its life, telling the earth's story. But my stone has another story; the story of how it came into my life in the summer of 1982 during a family vacation through the west. 

My husband, our ten-year-old son and I had climbed an easy sloping mountain where we sat, all three of us, hushed by the beauty of it all, the vastness from on high. The only sound, the flapping of a bird's wings. We sat in awed silence for a while, we three, with our own thoughts before we made our way back down the mountain. Our son, always fearless, made it down way ahead of us. It seemed like we all were craving continued silence as we went our separate ways to explore the creek bed, remaining within sight of each other, but feeling no need to talk. 

The creek was lively, yet easy to navigate. As I waded the shallow waters, the rock caught my eye. It was sitting there alone, glistening, serene, tempting. I moved to pick it up, but hesitated for a second, not wanting to disturb it in its ancient bed. In the silence it seemed to call me; a connection on a cellular level that has stayed with us for 32 years.  

She's a good traveler. (I think of her as female.) There is always room for her in my suitcase. She went to Scotland with me where I picked up a couple of traveling companions, two pieces of green marble from Iona. On a tour of the Isle of Coll, we saw formations of gneiss, some of  the oldest rock on earth. I think she felt at home there. 

I look at her every day. I hold her every day. She  has been a silent witness to my journey. She's seen every emotion it's possible for a human to have. Sometimes I look to her for answers. She never has any. What she does have when I hold her in my hand is solidity. She takes me right back to that ancient silence, which gives me the space to be calm and focused. It's her never-ending gift to me. One that I never take for granted. 

The few steady influences in my life are very precious to me. She has been a most steadfast presence. She doesn't judge. She abides. 

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

Logophile

I am a lifelong Logophile, a lover of words.  Words have been my friends for as long as I can remember. Before I learned to read I remember watching my mother, lost in reading her paperbacks and my dad being totally engrossed in his newspaper. I couldn’t wait to find out what that was all about

As I was growing up, I’m sure my family thought I was lying on my bed reading. But I was actually in England in a haunted mansion, or in Egypt excavating the tombs and reading hieroglyphics, or following Mowgli and Baloo through the jungle.  Words transported me to someplace else, which was exactly where I needed to be.

 I love the way words wrap themselves around your ears and touch your soul.Words spoken or written have the power to heal, wound, inspire and incite.  They change our world. Adolph Hitler used words to incite a whole country to commit atrocities that went against their very nature.  Randy Pausch inspired people to face death with grace and positivity, but to also live life to the fullest in his book The Last Lecture.  Jane Austen made young girls everywhere believe that true love was possible even if the odds were against them. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle turned us into amateur sleuths after reading Sherlock Holmes. Social media, through Tweeting and Facebook connected people who were determined to overthrow a corrupt leader in Egypt. 

Words matter. As is evidenced in our schools with all the bullying that is going on today. I remember my mother never allowing anyone to call me “Red”. She didn’t want me to be diminished by a nickname that only spoke to the color of my hair and not who I really was. In grade school some boys would say to me, “I’d rather be dead than red on the head”. This gave me permission to chase them around the playground and show them how weak they were in the running department.

The word vagina can titillate a room full of women who were born with one when they were asked to ponder, “What was my vagina doing in 1988?”

Sometimes our own words can come back to bite us in the butt, for instance, when we make statements like  I would never…

We begin learning at a very early age how to be effective communicators with our words and how we use them.  My son learned early on that whining got him nowhere. 

Everyday I receive A. Word. A. Day  from: https://www.google.com/#q=wordsmith+anagram

I’m still learning.

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

When someone else's finger goes inside your nose

When someone else's finger goes inside your nose, it leaves a permanent impression.

Catherine stood over me with her latex glove pointer finger inside my right nostril.


"I never force the nose work," she says "I just wait for it to open."

I could hear the clock ticking, feel her finger sliding deeper into my nostril.  I wondered if she would reach something painful, or sweetly discomforting.  Her finger just kept going in.  I imagined  her finding my brain up in there.  When it didn't go any further she just stopped.  At some point I opened my mouth to breathe out.

I'd always been taught that a finger in the nose is not a polite gesture, but I've found Rolfing is not much concerned with politeness.

Since June, I've been receiving the Rolfing 10 series as part of the initiation or prerequisite to attend the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration in Boulder, CO.  Flash back to my first session, undressed taking laps around the table.  Laying curious, asking..."are you pulling on my intestines?"  Yes, she was.

"If you like the nose work you're a natural Rolfer." 

Catherine slid her finger out of one nostril and into the other.  I giggled.

Rolfing is a form of bodywork and way of seeing that works with the human form in gravity.  And the form is worked directly on through connective tissue.  Its been around more than 50 years and many people that I talk to have either received some Rolfing or knows someone who has.  It's been interesting to navigate the stories of people who have received the work.  Some people I'd talked with in the beginning reported pain or aversion, that it felt like too much.  I've never felt it to be the case in any session, even when the Rolfer did have my intestines.  Curious what feels like pain to some.

It's hard to communicate the essence of a fundamental change while in it.  I feel like a vitally different person, and it feels wild that I appear as the same person I was to anyone.  The loudness of my voice has changed, I can feel my legs, and differentiate the vertebrae of my low back.  My morning walks feel like I have taken awareness into a whole new person's form.

It occurs to me that I will soon be putting my fingers in other people's nostrils.  And in other people's mouths.  I will soon be looking at the human form in a new way and using my fists and elbows to work and move flesh, and tissue.  I will be putting my hand in people's armpits and backsides.

And I can't wait!

Allison