abundance and patience…2-6-18

Adopt the pace of nature; her secrret is patience.Emerson

You gotta love living in California. Where else would you receive a birthday invitation where creating your own drum nudges out pin the tail on the donkey? Just being a smart aleck…I’m thrilled. And, as if that is not cool enough, there’s a choice of elk skin for calling in patience or buffalo skin for calling in abundance. Well, I only had to sit with that a moment because it was clear pretty fast. And apparently, out of eleven drum-making guests, I was the only one that felt called to summon in patience.

And that created pause for reflection…and gratitude. Because at the brink of this final life chapter there is nothing I feel in need of. On the material side, hubby and I, fast approaching seventy, do not have a handy fall-back pension plan. We did, however, manage to sock away some bucks during a few high-earning years. Fortunately we both love the work we do and somehow, miraculously, it consistently pays out just enough to cover our moderate life style. Though we are slowly cutting back, neither of us feel a strong call to retire. Yet.

I’ve experienced the losses, trials and setbacks, the hard times, challenges and tears that beset us all…yet I have currently landed in a place of abundance. In material well-being, yes. But more importantly in love and friendship and health and right work. Rarely does a day pass without my deep appreciation of this surprising prevailing state of affairs. If you knew me back when, you would not have predicted it. And I know it can change in a moment. I get it.

This drum-making is a prayer for patience:

Patience with a body that heals much more slowly than before, creaks and groans when I lift it out of bed, lays itself down at night with an ever-deepening sense of exhaustion.

Patience with a heart that recognizes there are not enough years left to crumble all the well-constructed defenses it so carefully erected during its first few decades.

Patience with a cortex that seems to be unable to call up the vocabulary I know I once possessed, the names of people I have met many times and the specific reason I have walked into a room.

Patience with the man I live with whose idiosyncratic nature seems to be on the upswing and is undoubtedly matched only by my own intensifying peculiarities.

Patience with a world that seems to have gone awry and this dread feeling that the energy I’ve invested in all things planetary over the course of a lifetime has been for naught.

Patience with my soul that knows this is simply not true and continues to summon up the energy to do good work out there, buoyed by the twin remembrance of ancestors and grandchildren.

Patience with my spirit that, on a rare occasion, longs for all this to end but mostly is in awe that this juicy aliveness, blood pumping life force, hot breath is still moving through me and every day I live draws me ever closer to keenly sensing how precious this one life is.

So…prayers for abundance, prayers for patience. Why limit yourself to one or the other? Call them in. If you want some support for that…well, this is my work in the world. Let’s get together.

Love, bella

 

 


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