A fragile knowing

“Gentleness is not the absence of violence; gentleness is the mastery over violence.”

Abhijit Naskar

Today, I am just going to sit it out. The rush, the presumed need to accomplish, the pressure cooker I know as misleading tiny grains of anxiety swirling through my veins. I am going to sit, watch our walls if needed, hours on end. Today I am going to choose and write those kind words that softly stroke and relax misleading tiny facial muscles silently carrying me through stressors I hardly recognize as damaging.

Today, I am going to sit with the news and inhale the pressure on my chest, the heavyness of reality, the potential undermining of any existential courage.

Today I am going to love what is here, inhale into my imagination and exhale its overwork to keep me from falling, to keep me from surrendering to what is here. Today, I do not ask anything from myself. Today is a day of practice, a day of practicing the type of gentleness that comes from mastering self - or other directed anger. Today, I am going to fiercely love an outdated attempt to control pain in situations that left or leave me feeling powerless and disconnected from a place of shared compassion.

Today, I am the embrace I need and always very much needed, an embrace everyone, I believe, needs. Is. A deep, deep softening, a sense of wholeness offered by one's own breath, a rejoicing in a transpersonal resilience beyond imagination.

Today, I am going to radically be with what is, even if feeling down because of the world's alienating madness.

Slowing down my movements, I am inviting my mind’s eye to see eye to eye with myself, allowing myself to be more than a list of chores, tasks, roles, opinions or certificates, allowing myself to be everything all at once, to expand into the actual longing behind an internalized emphasis on growth or rightfulness. Today, I am going to unlock becoming by being unlocked, out in the open of a cared for heart, leaning into the void as if it were a cradle.

Today, I am not nice to ‘be nice’, I am assertively nice because it is the only right response to everyone's rightful, even if often painfully crafted call for attention. Reveiling what is there, a bundle of energy waiting to be endorsed as part of a communal effort to live together.

Today, I rest, again, in the fragile knowing that we all live together.