Getting the Message
“I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured,” she writes. “I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.” ~Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face
It doesn’t matter how many times I watch the sun rise over the ocean. It feels new each time. Sometimes bright and blinding , other times a slow coloring of sky, clouds obscuring it from coming in all at once. Truths, too, reveal themselves like this to me.
Awareness, discernment comes the way that light comes over the ocean—sometimes clouded, sometimes blinding, beautiful colors shifting, not something that I simply “get” and then hold contained. It rises and merges into the movement of the day, the shifting shadows of life.
Like the way that I sense and settle into living in peace or in the promise of love.
Or the way that I understand how to live in connection with embodiment, community, a vast perspective that I am held in a larger vision of time.
Or the way that I understand how to steady myself so that I am not carrying overwhelm into each moment.
I know, but then I seem not to know. The moment of awareness comes upon me and then merges or shifts into the shadows of the day.
Anne Lamott wrote a story that I think of a lot about a young girl asking her preacher father why people come Sunday after Sunday to hear him at church. He replied that every Sunday they come so that they can be reminded that God loves them and that there is nothing they can do to separate themselves from that love. But by Monday, they forget. So the next week they have to return again. Over and over, it’s like this with truth.
I remember that life must include rest. And then I forget. I remember that I must not make any sudden moves and that, so often, breath will carry me further than words. I remember that I am limited and also part of something limitless. And then I forget. Over and over, I remember and then I forget the most important things.
Remembering takes community and steadying myself to pause long enough to look up. Like when I arrive on the beach before the sunrise with my own mental agenda and suddenly see everyone else snapping photos behind me, I have to stop myself, turn around, lift my eyes to what’s all around me but that I’m about to miss.
Folks who are remembering remind me. Steadying myself into stillness, the true north arrow compasses itself back again. I stand in the yoga room with students and teacher, or at the shoreline of the ocean watching my daughter learning to meditate, and I remember.