On Movement and Change

For the past two years I have been spending half the year in the states to be near my elderly mother. Going between places is trying for me. As much as I don’t want to and am not aware of attaching myself to the reality of wherever I am, I must do it, because changing places is both frightening and unsettling for me. Especially coming home to México. Odd because it’s the place I love, yet it’s been difficult to return each time.

I share with you this reflection from the first year I returned home from being in the states for seven months:

Today was my first day going out into Nature. I knelt down and touched a rock and the dirt path that the local campesinos (farmers) use to go out to their fields by horse or foot every day and wept. “Why does it take me so long to get here?” I lifted my head to the green, earth and sky and simply said that which I have been afraid to proclaim since my return: This is the place that feeds my soul.

I wanted to head towards the river and bathe on a rock. On the trail, I passed by the spot that was my destination. Not seeing a clear path down, I decided to head down and around to another path that would take me there. On the path there were many options. To the left, to the right. I was relaxed and unconcerned about making the right choice and keeping track of those little decisions. I was casual in my approach.

I passed through a part that reminded me of the time several years ago that I went out by myself, in the heat of the year with little water and a few seeds to eat and got lost. I thought it might be the death of me. When I had been trying to navigate my way back to what I knew, I often started down paths that seemed trodden and hopeful, only to turn back with fright when they petered out. I remember I didn’t want to get lost. Of course I was already lost. I just didn’t recognize it.

I experienced how time and repetition had been knitting knowing, trust and comfort into my being. “All the paths come together and will take me to the same place in the end,” I knew. How different was this walk from walks in the past where I would hang bits of toilet paper on bushes or arrange long sticks on the ground into huge arrows to see and guide me at every juncture on my return home.

I didn’t see the alternative path down to the big river rocks and ended up high up instead. I glimpsed a patch of yellow white sunlight on the path and decided I would stop and sit there awhile. The roar of the river was faint. I listened to it. What is the nature of a river, I pondered? Movement. A stick fell from a tree. Movement. A bird sang. Sound is vibration which is movement, too. Is movement everywhere in everything in life? What about stagnant water? Is there movement there? Mosquitos which bring disease lay their eggs there. With time, which is movement, everything changes. I felt propelled to get up and turn back.

The rumble of the river below grew louder and I renewed my search for a simple way to it and found one. I took off my sandles, put my feet in the cold current and looked up river to where the water was rushing and felt it’s force and power. Looking down river, viewing the flow from behind, all seemed calm and easy, no hurry. Just like the process of letting go, before and after. During? Cold feet immersed feeling the push, yet solid enough to not get swept away.

I got up and continued on the path towards home. I walked on large round stones that had been placed to ease the walk of men and horses at some point and wondered, “Where am I now?” I didn’t know but I did know I was walking in the right direction, towards where people lived. I wondered, “Could this be the part where one is returning home?” It seemed too soon but after a few minutes I was climbing back up and recognized a bit of broken tile amongst the rocks and dirt and realized, indeed, I was almost home. Sometimes I am further along than I think.

We Live on A Planet of Change

The other day in the combi (a converted VW van which serves as the local transportation) I watched a boy sitting near the open window, his dark straight hair fluttering in the wind. “Kids and dogs,” I mused, “always like to have their heads hanging out the window.”

Not liking wind myself, I wrapped my jacket a little tighter around me for protection. “What’s that about?” I asked myself. “Why do dogs and kids like to feel the wind so much?”

My thoughts stopped with the arrival of a primordial awareness: There is wind. We live on a planet where the air moves. I’d never thought of that before. “It could have been different,” I thought. “We could have been on a planet with no wind, which was still. From where does it come, this impulse of air to move?” The magic and mystery of movement revealed itself to me and I was full with a simple, universal truth of life on planet Earth: We are not part of a stagnant life. We are part of a changing one.

Do you take movement for granted? How well do you deal with its implications? Do you like to stick your head out the window when someone else is driving? What is it about that?

I invite you to share your thoughts and reflections on wind and dogs and kids and rivers, flow, and attachment,  and change. I look forward to hearing from you!