Dear Friends ~ I recently participated in a conversation in which dissatisfaction or dissonance was a recurring theme poignantly and piercingly captured in a line quoted from a Mary Oliver poem:
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment...
Somewhere along the continuum from self-loathing and beating oneself up to don't worry/be happy and keep busily distracted, must be a way of channeling this disparity into learning. How do we allow that longing, that discrepancy between who we think we are and who we want to be, to become not a well of disparagement but fertile ground for discovery, the disquiet that prods and encourages us into growth and change? Sufi music interprets the plaintive sound of the ney, an ancient reed flute still in use from almost 5000 years ago, as the reed lamenting its separation from the reed bed. The Sema ceremony of the Sufi whirlers was explained to me as "being empty like the ney and listening with the eye of the heart to the breath of God within."
The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that Love is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, Love is under the porch as well as on the top of the mountain, and JOY is both in the front row and in the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.