Peaceful internal resilience

[sabrinamari]

I have been craving ground and structure lately. This is pretty normal for me: I am mostly water, and the strength and weakness of water is that it tends to take the shape of whatever vessel into which it is poured.

Looking around , I want to see clear and orderly spaces. I want to know the shape of my week and my month; I want to see my blank book with its checklists and musings close at hand. I want to know when I can expect things to appear and disappear again. I want to rest in the safety of a familiar structure.

Of course, I know this longing for solidity and structure is like grasping at clouds: I can create it---with more difficulty than most---and I can even maintain it for awhile. But really, there is no safety. There is no solid ground---none that persists, anyway---no matter how I may wish for it. Things unfold as they are meant to, and change is the rule, not the exception. The only real safety is to cultivate a peaceful internal resilience and a willingness to roll with whatever the world brings without losing my most important areas of focus. I guess I'd call this basic sanity: the ability to return to balance when necessary despite external circumstances.

So today, I'll breathe in and out and sit quietly with myself, grounding and centering as best I can, and noticing my cravings without collapsing into them. Today I will make a plan to build some structure into my month without investing too much into it so that it can change, too. Today I'll seek to relax into whatever the world offers in gratitude and pleasure. Usually, whatever it brings is more delightful than anything I could have planned or imagined anyway.

Comments

[otterdancing.livejournal.com]

'The only real safety is to cultivate a peaceful internal resilience and a willingness to roll with whatever the world brings without losing my most important areas of focus. I guess I'd call this basic sanity: the ability to return to balance when necessary despite external circumstances.
So today, I'll breathe in and out and sit quietly with myself, grounding and centering as best I can, and noticing my cravings without collapsing into them."

Beautiful. And exactly what I was working with last night with my teacher Thorn. This is what I also am attending to and striving for.

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

I am the daughter of earth and water,
   And the nursling of the sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
   I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain,
   The pavilion of heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,
   Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
   And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
   I arise and unbuild it again.

-- P. B. Shelley, The Cloud

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

so beautiful!