Yesterday I woke early for a zoom yoga class, yawning as I wiggled my toes awake on my navy blue mat and grateful for the wise words of my instructor comfortably speaking to us from the future (aka: central standard time). What stayed with me most from the group was a casual comment she made that went something like “If you have dogs and children walking in and out of your zoom just invite them in and recognize it as a moment of abundance.”
Abundance.
The word echoed around me and I smiled. Yes, yes. Summer is indeed full of growing children eating popsicles and bouncing basketballs, iced tea and dahlias and romaine lettuce that grows fast enough to eat a salad for every meal. In a world that can feel exhausting and cruel, summer arrives on the scene like a puppy wagging its tail in our tired faces. Your abundance might look less like dogs and kids and more like quiet sunlight at 9pm, but it is good to reflect on what we’re given.
This was a prompt I offered recently, as a line pulled from a poem we read together. Here are a few of our responses, shared with permission.
We are given life, a tiny flicker in the vastness of us all, a bonfire in the life of an individual. We are given life to live - to live as we are able, or if lucky, as we choose. We are given breathe to survive the harshness of the world, to make our way through no matter what. Even when it does us harm, we breath. We are given free will, allowing us to circle in indecision, and allowing us to decide. We circle with our options, a fragile dance. We are given this moment, this day. We are given the sun and the moon and the rain; what more is holding us up? The river flows, always, day and night, constant. It is never the same; higher, lower, faster, and always the water flows. This is what we are given. We are given Life. -Susan McChesney
What we’re given is an expanse of time to appreciate, see, enjoy, and observe. We’re also given time to fret, worry, and grieve. I try to spend more time in the former, focusing on the natural world and the garden, continuing sources of restoration and growth. I’m grateful to be surrounded by a rural expanse of farm fields, forested cliffs, rocky beaches, and an infinite sky, so unlike our urban space that we also call home. We are given much, and I try to stay aware of that as I try not to fall into melancholy. The weight of difficult things seems lighter seeing happy vacationing families at the park, small children riding amazingly small bicycles, laughing with their parents. Novice garden visitors gawking at huge peony flowers on a free admission Sunday. The reports of friends reminding me of how much fun it was to actually go on a trip last week and visit gardens in their company. Stay grounded there, I tell myself. Appreciate the current moment and practice hope. “Hope is a muscle,” Krista Tippett, the host of On Being, writes. Indeed. -Lisa Wagner
She was gifted a clean blank notebook page after page of snowy white openness inviting the mountainous terrain of her interior mind to flatten out into words an airplane landing on smooth cement after miles of turbulent skies she wrote her name in cursive on the upper right hand corner of the first page like she had been taught in school left a few pages blank as a buffer between the careless world and her throbbing heart picked up a pencil (safer than pens, she thought) and bled everywhere red hot thoughts splattering the pages mixing with that clean white and turning pink as she wrote the intensity lessoning as she gave herself a voice -Alli Dahlgren
I love this, Alli. And thanks for your excellent prompts and encouragement for writing.