February 19, 2011

“Know that you will be feeling and seeing and taking in a great deal. Know that you will be healing at a deeper level than ever before. Most of the time this will bring joy. But an open heart is not one dimensional…make room in your heart, room in your life and time in your day to feel other feelings too – anger, grief, fear, exuberance, tenderness, betrayal and exhilaration - all the emotions an open heart feels…”

(Melody Beattie – Journey to the Heart)

February 19, 2012

There’s been a lot on my mind lately; I’m one that likes to understand how ideas relate, but it often takes me a long time to process and make sense of stuff.  Three of the seemingly unrelated things I’ve been mulling over for awhile are the idea of minimalism, the desire to live an open life, and the concept of roots – I’ve had a feeling that they would eventually somehow all connect and develop into a deeper meaning. I started noticing the word open about a year ago as it popped up continuously on the healing pages I was reading: open to possibility, open heart, open to healing, open life, open hands, open to love. Lately I’ve been thinking of it a lot more again in light of attempting to live a more clutter free, simple existence.  When I first attempted to reconcile these two ideas I thought of being open as somewhat contrary to minimalism, like being without boundaries, letting in everything at the mercy of the flood waters.  However, living simply AND openly makes sense after all if I look at it in a dialectical way: it allows me to be open to accept and free to let go, open to love and enjoy people and things, and free to not hold on too tightly in an attempt to make them my security and identity; open to say “yes” to possibility and free to say “no” to the things that add unnecessary burden to my routine; open to joy and other “positive” emotions, and free to accept and then release the more painful ones that life is guaranteed to bring. A life that is closed, restricted, and narrow may give the illusion of security, predictability and simplicity but may not necessarily live up to that at all; it may be simple on one hand, but it may also prove to be empty. I don’t want to pursue a simple life just for the sake of having less; I want a life characterized by openness and fullness of experience.  Joshua Becker defines minimalism in the way I want to approach it:  intentionaly promoting the things one most values while removing everything that distracts from it.  And most importantly, like Ann Morrow Lindbergh writes in her beautiful book “Gift From the Sea,” I want to be at peace with myself as I consider the shape of my life within the context of my desires: “I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life…I want to ‘live in grace’ as much of the time as possible…an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony.”  This is where the idea of roots ties in. A year ago, as I have other times in other years, I wrote in my journal that I wanted to “put down roots.” I used to believe that roots was a kind of feeling that only came from living in one place for a long time, something I haven’t done since my childhood, and that a sense of centeredness and belonging would eventually come after many years. But through the ridiculous amount of changes I’ve experienced, including multiple cross country moves, I now see roots as something that grows inside of me rather than getting put down in a tangible place. There a line of a song that’s been running through my head the last couple weeks that says: “my roots have grown but I don’t know where they are” (The Head and the Heart – Cats and Dogs). Initially I didn’t get why I connected to it so strongly since at first-listen it seemed like a rather lonely statement projecting a sense of being lost which I don’t feel (at least today – ha!). But I’ve realized it means something very different for me: I see having roots as being grounded on the inside, a posture or an attitude of gratitude for what is, a knowing of who I am and being ok with that wherever I go, not a feeling that is determined by a location. Living an open, simple, rooted life is made possible first by knowing that what I value most isn’t dependent on any external circumstances. I say a big fat YES to that!!! And to making room in my heart, room in my life and time in my day…