Abidance

Devotion. Attentiveness. Abidance.

These are the qualities my work asks of me.

All of these qualities require time. Time that life doesn’t always grant me. Devotion asks for daily practice. Attentiveness asks me to slow down enough to really listen and see and feel. And abidance, well, that’s right there in the definition. It means to stay with something as long as it takes.

I am diligently doing my daily duties. Meditating. Asana. Plant care. Dog loving. Cooking. Creating art. Writing. Sharing. Partnering.

At the same time, I am desperately yearning to collapse. Watch movies. Scroll through social media. Eat French fries. Listen to silly books. Shop for clothes. Pull inward from the world.

I am tired.

So I examine my schedule. What can I leave out? How can I be more efficient?

I examine my work. What can I leave out? How can I be more efficient?

I take a breath. And another breath. These are questions that come from bargaining. Not from a devotion to the mysteries which resist easy understanding.

This memory arises.

I am sitting in the Sonoran desert, in June, with the five gallons of water I carried on my back to assure my survival. I am listening for guidance. Praying to catch a glimpse of the sacred. As I move with the paltry shade of a skinny mesquite tree, dodging the unrelenting sun, I measure the hours of the day by insect sound. There are bush grasshoppers chirruping in the dark, bees humming in as dawn streams in and then come the cicadas, which give voice to the heat with their loud rhythmic thrumming.

Each minute feels like an hour. Sweaty and bored, surrendering my pretence of reverence, I fall asleep and dream that an elephant steps through my chest. Red morning glories spill out.

I wonder if this is what it means to be dismembered.
I wonder if this is what surrender asks of us.

I give myself over to the land, allowing the land to feed from my body. Collapsed. Dissolved. Unknown.

I hear the cicadas and begin to remember. I begin to re-member myself. Pulling myself together, I leave the bits I no longer need to be composted by the rocky soil. Consciously I choose to include the pink desert sand, the hollow skeleton of cholla, several saguaro spines and one glorious sunset colored bloom of the prickly pear. Desert sky. Space. All become part of my body.

Along with the memory of insect time. And minutes that can feel like hours.

My work could be called time-consuming, but the divine and the wild and the imaginal have never measured themselves in hours.

I wonder if time is measured there at all.

And I return to my work with devotion, attentiveness and abidance.

And leave the measuring of time to the wind.