Full Day, Full Moon, Full Heart

I have put in a twelve hour day: A morning helping young children with math and language and singing happy Earth songs, and the afternoon and evening serving lunch, treats, and espresso to a community of artists. The chairs are up, the floor has been swept and mopped, the dishes are washed. I have dinner among friends at the dining hall and count my blessings, one, two…more than I have fingers and toes, the list goes…on and on.

I am soaring with gratitude, its wings like flapping prayer flags in the wind paying an elegant homage to the deities of the day. There is richness here, not of pocket or possession, but of heart and mountain, wood and water, words and faces. Deep into dusk, I walk back along the ridge to my car, the craft school studios lit up like fairyland under an orange-trimmed azure sky, a few moths darting about, wind rustling the hollow shafts of ornamental grasses along the top of the rock wall walkway.

Callie’s advice rings like a soft monastery bell in my mind, a gentle reminder to “soak it all up,” to love the lonliness like the river that it is, tumbling down joyfully instead of dreadfully, embracing the solitude willingly instead of fearfully, welcoming the demons with key lime pie and a seat at the supper table and a smile on my face. “Your suffering is your practice; that is your path,” the Tibetan teachers say. Furthermore, “Suffering is joy and joy is joy,” meaning both make up two sides of the same coin, both are teachers, both are nothing and everything in the same breath.

And for a long moment, I wouldn’t change a thing.