I built a meditation studio off my bedroom when I bought this house seven years ago. A place to come to restore, retreat, rejuvenate. Sometimes I avoid it - seeking out other places where I can hide from myself. Today, after meditation and yoga, all I wanted was to be in this space. To cherish it while I enjoy a lovely fall day where the weather feels like absolutely nothing on your skin...a slight breeze every once in awhile just to let you know that you are not completely naked...because that is how the weather makes you feel...unclothed, barren, open to the possibilities life looms in your path.
It is here I am learning to be still. It is often excruciating. It is often unreachable by my current mental state. But lately, as Fall ushers in shorter days and longer nights, I feel myself needing, yearning, compelling stillness in action, in thought and in deed.
I have even slowed my eating...becoming wholly aware of eat bite taken...whereas before I could consume an entire meal and think back and realize that I barely tasted it...now, I seem to have time to chew the food, instead of inhale it...and I wonder what has changed.
Me. I have changed.
Not enough, of course...the old bad habits and allures dance nightly in my head. The promise of love and union and partnership and commitment - a pretty delusion to which I have been forever wed. Now it seems like folly. All my relationships and situationships under harsh review...was there one that wasn’t just another version of the one before? Looking back, it seems like the answer is a definitive no.
So today I sit on this porch, although that is not a good name...it is not just an outjutting of an entrance or exit...it is intentionally crafted to bring about a feeling of peace, tranquility and to stop time from doing what it does to me. Porch doesn't seem like the correct nomenclature...but I have failed at finding another name that is apt.
My heart feels broken. Lost to me. My attempts to give it away, more like an unwanted re-gifted sweater at the holidays. If I don’t want it, then why would anyone else. So the path appears...want your own heart just for you. No one else. And so I begin...
And it starts here in this outdoor space...where time loses meaning and in return, I gain it. It is here where I find myself, all the me’s I have locked away or rented out, even some of those I sold wholesale long ago come back around.
The Wisteria I planted took over long ago. Now provides a shading shelter so that one can sit, even in the heat of summer, and find shade and rest and peaceful abiding in this place, where the only chore known is to come to know yourself better...
I sit on my swing and sway back and forth, staring up at the gnarled tangle of Wisteria branches...I put roots down here. Literally. Crafted and carved this exterior to my own liking, purposeful and creative and humble. I have never had a place like this...within me or outside me. It is as if my interior knew but wanted to keep it a secret, from me, for me.
And on days like today, I sit idly with nothing to do but breathe and live and dream and reminisce...while doing my best to stop my mind from wandering into the dangerous land of the future. Instead, I remain affixed in place, rooted here among the Wisteria...porch living whilst porch sitting, and so I return here every day.
