It Takes Courage
© Robin Easton - All Rights Reserved
Wild Desert of Northern New MexicoRarely have I found courage to be something I experience before I leap into the unknown. More often than not, it's an after-the-fact emotion, one I feel after I've made myself face an abyss of fear.
I like to tell myself and others to take heart when it comes to facing fear. Although the actual decision to leap into the abyss has to be made by each of us, individually. In that regard it is a solitary experience, yet, I do not feel that we walk alone to the edge. Others walk with us, or have walked the edge before us, or follow behind us, whether or not they know it.
Most of us cannot get through this life without at least one leap of faith.
At some or other as we move through our lives, many of us, if not all, grope blindly for some form of freedom or light. Even as we enter our own or the cultural shadow, I think we all secretly hope to find a spark of light.
I also think living takes exceptional courage when we move through the world with our eyes and hearts open. We need to honor this.
It takes courage to be alive.
The longer I live, the less I seem to worry about living an emotionally tidy and mistake-free life. I passed that point a long time ago. I have always chosen to live with immense gusto. I have probably lived a hundred lifetimes in this one puny...magnificent..life.
I live the way I cook. I have never followed neat precise recipes, measuring each ingredient. Nope, that’s just not me. I grab a bowl or pot, open the fridge and cupboards and start chopping and dumping, a pinch of this, a fist full of that, some of this for color, some of that for texture, and mix it all up and see what happens. If it needs mashing or mixing, I wash my hands and dive in with all ten fingers gleefully squeezing and ‘smushing’. Yes, ‘smushing,’ a word that my spellchecker begs me to correct to smashing, mushing, matching, slushing, and shushing.
However, I love ‘smushing.’ It is so delicious, like my made-from-scratch meals, bread, dips, sauces, and more. And….must I remind Mr Spellchecker that all words were originally ‘made-from-scratch’ by some human, living somewhere. I am just doing my part to make sure that the English language does not stagnate.
My life is not neat and orderly and never has been (although my home usually is quite orderly). However, my life has been a patchwork quilt of immense passion, abysmal wailing grief and tears, laughter and joy, shock and fiery rage (when needed), and scraps of beauty salvaged from ashes of horror and horrendous pain, along with delightful success and not so delightful failures, as well as overwhelming shadows and searing bright light. I’ve lived in a state of intense intimacy with Life, all experiences embraced by a soul driven by curiosity and passionate love. I thrive on experiential-learning and living.
I often remind myself that the most beautiful bowls are made with muddy, clay-covered hands. And, the most beautiful flowers burst from the most foul-smelling manure.
I remember how lighthearted I felt when I finally realized that I am not here to achieve the perfect life or the perfect spirit and soul. I am born of perfection and I already am perfect, as are we all.
I am not here to work it all out before I start to live.
I would never live.
I am not here to work it all out before I dare open my mouth and cry out or speak up. I would never cry out or speak up. I allow myself to boldly trust my gut and act on intuition and even impulse. I allow myself to be fully human, mistakes and all. I allow myself the conscious experience of being human….and very alive.
I am not here to work it all out before I dare pick up my creativity and wildly express my life through music, writing, photography, or art. I would never create…anything. No. For me too work it all out before I dare live, is to not live at all. For me, that is a life-robbing prison that I won't walk into. I prefer to keep my eyes, heart, and mind open, and to give myself the freedom of working it out as I go. I prefer to trust myself and life. I also allow myself a forever malleable, shifting, changing perspective. I carry no boxes, no containers filled with tightly-clung theories. I meet life in each moment that arises, as fully present as I know how.
I am here to experience life, to find out who I am and what I'm capable of feeling, doing, and being. I am here to learn what it means to be both human and humane, and what it means to be 'humanimal', a part of all the rest of myself: animal, insect, rock, tree, air, plant, and sea.
And….through my own suffering, I awaken to the acute intelligence of empathy, the ability to understand another soul’s suffering without judgment. Because…I know firsthand my own failings, sufferings, and joys.
Through experience, many experiences, I have come to deeply know my own soul, and from there to feel and understand the Soul of the World, which is something that makes me weep with compassionate empathy and love.
Today, as I bravely navigate my life, and move through both the human-world, and the world at large, I often remember something an Australian Aboriginal friend taught me. “Rarely are things what they seem. There is much magic going walkabout. All around us and within us are forces so huge they make human-rules, judgement, and reason look like dried up wallaby dung.”
When I walked into the Australian rainforest and eventually let go of my social conditioning, I returned to a curious, keen mind, an adventurous spirit and an intimate, untamed soul. I learned that Life is eager to teach what we need to know, as long as we don't completely fill our inner emptiness with other people's beliefs and judgments, with other people's knowledge, theories, and wisdom, no matter how well intended, no matter how brilliant.
We must experience life for ourselves...firsthand...to know who we are, to know the bare bones of our existence.
The world might never have known our unique way of being. Unencumbered by conditioning, it could be the most astounding thing the world has ever seen.
© Robin Easton