Carried By Surprise

On grace in the darkness

Dear Ones -

Yesterday, Freddi and I spent three hours making bookmark gifts for our family. Okay, correction: I spent three hours making bookmark gifts. Freddi put in a solid 25 minutes and then shot baskets, swatted balloons, made hot chocolate, and read his book. Turns out his interest level in collage, glue, and laminate is low. Like, very very low.

I stayed cheerful though! Despite the annoying balloons! And the empty seat across from me! Because this year, I’ve been learning to love differences a little more. Okay, correction again: I’ve learned to hate them a little less.

I have come to believe that an inability to allow for and hold our differences - as related to others and within ourselves - is crushing our hearts and ripping us apart. Vitriol, rage, meanness and blame dominate our media and condition the stories we tell ourselves about the other out in the world and the other within ourselves. We are rapidly losing the ability to hold paradox, to see and seek connection, and to allow wildly different things be true at once.

As I sit in the darkness today of the winter solstice - this hinge of the year, this portal of transformation - I honor the challenge that we are each called to: if we want to be part of growing the light in this world then we have to be willing to connect with darkness, to not-know. We have to build our capacity for uncertainty. We have to love questions more than answers. We have to learn to feel our way, sense our way, and listen our way through the dark.

I would love to live, writes John O’Donohue,

Like a river flows.

Carried by the surprise

Of its own unfolding.

Where do we resist being carried by surprise? Where are we stuck in certainty? What stories keep us all trapped in separation-mind and separation-heart? Who do we instantly write-off because of ________? Fill in the blank - your own conditioning will create a million reasons.

Today on the solstice, in the darkness, try this. Remember how you were carried by surprise this year. I like to call that grace. Remember the moments that grace fell from the sky like a gentle rain and met you in your thirst. Remember the times of surprise that showed up in the form of a person, an animal, a tree, a phone call, an opportunity, a gesture, some money, some food, an available appointment, a kindness, an opportunity, a door opened, a light slanting, a presence, a wonderful, surprise presence.

Remember the moments you were proven wrong in your story of separation and isolation. Write them out. List them. And then remember to linger in what that unfolding surprise of grace felt like. Still feels like. Now. Right now. Soak it up. Let it change the cells of your body as they drink from that well.

Because, after all, writes the poet Mikko Harvey in [From For M]:

The number

of hours

we have

together is

actually not

so large.

Please linger

near the

door uncomfortably

instead of

just leaving.

Please forget

your scarf

in my

life and

come back

later for

it.

Oh, beautiful, wounded hearts, life is so short. The door is here. It is cracked open. Let’s stand near it, together, in it, keeping that opening, however awkwardly, trying and trying again and trying again and trying again to stay in the portal, to remain in the not-knowing, to allow for and then appreciate the surprise of a scarf, a return, an invitation, a visitor, a presence, a presence of love.

May this year be the year of building our capacity stay in the hard place of not-knowing. To not reach for easy, conditioned, fear-driven and familiar answers. To begin to appreciate and be able to hold the tension of difference and the grace that comes when we allow it.

May this be the year that forgiveness comes more easily when we forget, when we do the same old thing. May this be the year that curiosity replaces final judgment, that we learn to sit with and become interested in what we don’t understand in the other, don’t relate to, and don’t agree with. May this year be the year we also sit with those same things within ourselves. The longing and the fear both…. allowing them to share a table, to feel welcome.

And may the remembrance of grace - all those unexpected moments of connection - bathe you in light and open your heart to receiving even more. Even more.

With love from the darkness, I am yours in collaging my way through it all with glue and magazines and laminate that always curls in weird ways and picks up every dang crumb from the table, I am yours in staying at it, the opening of the heart-space for ever more love to flow in and flow out, becoming a river of wonder and surprise.

Sara

Bookmark Factory! Sorry to family members who will now not be surprised by their bookmark!

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