This Is What It Feels Like to Arrive.

What I am trying to say here is something I have not yet learned to do. Which is perhaps exactly why it needs to be said. Everything that exists was impossible until it wasn't. The fact that I am running my hand along the seam of this impossibility tells me something in me is already beginning to open. It is the first sign of light reaching into a place that is working to become possible.

I’ve been sitting inside the intensity of this time in the world, as each of us are, watching what happens when powerful things rise inside a human life. Rage, despair, desire, creativity, vision—the forces that propel us into action and change. And what I see, in myself and everywhere around me, is that we do not know how to meet these moments without being swept up in them. We are no longer in relationship to what is happening. We are inside it, being dragged. Asleep, in the dream.

I have been here many times, inside the experience and yet unable to locate myself within it. Something in me does not yet know how to stand up inside what is taking hold, and goes missing.

I’ve tried to quiet strong forces and turn them down, afraid of their intensity, mistaking it for danger. The intensity has never been the problem. The danger is not recognizing what rises in us as a teacher. It brings us to the parts of ourselves we have not yet entered, not yet embodied, not yet lived from. It shows us where we are unfinished and where we have not yet learned to turn the light on. There is no need to turn from the pressure. What we most need is to learn how to arrive inside it and enter the path the teacher is already making for us.

What makes this feel impossible is not only that we must learn to remain present as intensity moves through us, but that we must learn to shepherd it so that what emerges holds a sound, a rhythm, a coherence we have not broken. The perfume of the heart rather than the residue of our fear or disconnect.

I do not yet know how to do this, and though staying present can feel like the most elusive work of our lives, this edge of not knowing is not failure, but the place where something in us begins to take form.

We are learning how to enter our lives. To stand where we have not yet stood, without losing the ground beneath us. This is where life becomes something we can meet.

This is the moment, just before you arrive.

Since admitting the truth — that I was not lost, only afraid of what I already knew — something begins to happen that I did not expect. The energies of my body do not calm, instead they quicken.

My writing arrives with a new urgency, as if clawing its way through the paper. Dreams surface in strange symbols and images. Teeth, rows of them. A mouth opening as though something in me wants to eat a life whole.

The Persian poet Rumi once wrote:

“Take the cotton of the mind’s doom-ridden chatter out of your ears.
Hear the booming voice of the heavens, the roar of fate,
the ruckus the muse makes.”

There is a deeply intimate place that life is always trying to bring us to. When you stop resisting the unfolding, when you pull the cotton of refusal from your ears, all that self-imposed deafness, the plugged and bracing place in us, things do not grow quiet. Something enormous begins to speak. It rises and roars, mounting like pressure from both within and without.

It lifts and propels, filling the chest with vision, with earth, with the sense that we are in compassionate relationship with a world that feels as though it is asking something of us. More of our participation, our presence, as if knowing there are ears there listening.This is the ruckus the muse makes.

It has always been there, running sharp as mountain water over stone. The cotton in my ears kept me from hearing it.I had been bracing against it without knowing, as if it were dangerous, when it was only my own aliveness I was denying.

Since changing my language from I don’t know to I don’t know how, the world seems to have shifted slightly, as if searching for ways to bring the how into form.

Visions come to me as brief glimpses. When I walk through the forest I sometimes sense a presence just out of sight, as though it lives at the edge of my looking and my eyes have not yet learned how to focus on it.

It reminds me of the fields in early spring, when the ground loosens and life begins rushing back in, shoots pushing upward, wet earth, pale gold and first green returning to a landscape. It feels that way now, as if something has begun forming that had no room to form before the truth was spoken.

Before anything takes shape, the energy gathers and concentrates, the way it does when we begin to fall in love, a tension that seems to build all life.

We are moved in the same way migration rises in birds, the way the earth gathers before a mountain lifts, the way the tide turns under a distant moon. The way the winds of life slowly shift the great dark dunes of who we have been into new configurations.

Always there, bending the trees of the body and pulling the tide of blood, moving through us in long insistent currents. When we stop bracing against it, we begin to feel the full weight of it. The swell can be gentle, but more often it is potent and assertive, and we cannot always find language deep enough or strong enough to speak what we desire, or what we sense moving in the deep.

It doesn’t feel like the intensity itself is what we fear. Life has always moved through us this way, through creation, grief, and transformation. The difficulty seems to be that we do not yet know how to stay conscious inside it.

When something powerful moves through us, we often abandon ourselves in the process. We lose contact with the ground beneath us and with the still place in us that remembers where we stand and what we stand for. When that happens, what comes through us carries that same loss of coherence. Words get said and decisions are made, whole turns of a life, but we are often not fully there when they do.