I want to be quiet inside and a wild roar in a room when needed. I want to be loose and sometimes wobbly in all the right places so when it comes time to stand up and tell the truth, I know how vulnerable and uncertain feels. I want to look in a mirror and say, “Ah yes, this is where we are in life’s great unfolding.” I don’t want to sigh. I want to laugh with how juicy life can look. I want to be an ocean of transformation. I want to invite you in, to swim in unexpected currents, to feel briskly alive, to be rocked to sleep. I want to envelop you with blue and brush back the hair from your forehead and hold you, buoy you, so you can breathe the sun while you lay in my waves.
I do so love to love you. And YOU is vast. You are my lover and my children, and my dear pal in Brooklyn. YOU is my just met beautiful friend whose secrets will be new to me but whose texture is ancient and familiar, You is a man on the radio station who makes me hold my breath because what he says scares me. But I want to the be a woman who can love us into radical awakening, who believes that love can do that, who fiercely breathes in what is ugly, digests it and keeps only what can evolve into light. I want to be the woman who includes myself in that love I freely give, whose own laughter evokes the girl in me full of dreams and delights and possibilities. I want to love myself into lightness, to lay my burdens down, to do things daily that make my whole body happy.
Listen, I wake up sometimes an aching pile of bones and I look in the mirror and think “And my husband still loves this?” And I formulate a list of all that is broken and I reel my way through my day from coffee to red wine and coffee again. And I feel behind in all of life’s accomplishments.
But this story is rapidly growing old.
I am inches away from owning it all with a fierce joy. I want to open my body wholly to be touched by the world. I am moments away from being ceaselessly awake, awake to what is really going on, awake to the beauty that is miles beyond skin deep. I am seconds away from knowing that living is art, is beauty, is a gift. I am so close to timelessness that I don’t care how old I am, because I am 13 and 83 right now and I am yearning and innocent and wise all at once. And mostly I am willing, willing to be open to the miracles that can happen in an instant, changes that can unfold overnight. I am willing to be someone new, right now, right here, with this breath.
I am reeling with pleasure. Who might I be?