This week, I’m frankly feeling tired and needing to let go of some of the things I’m doing. So I’m offering a poem and a, well, I guess the second offering is a poem, too.

What might you let go of to make more space for yourself?

Alive. On some level being alive can seem like a bare minimum, a baseline. When nothing else is working, I can think, well, at least I'm alive. Instead of seeing it as a given, I want to see aliveness as an enormous miracle, as the whole point.

Some time ago, my husband Frank told me about a philosophical piece he’d read that suggested that the goal of life is aliveness. I remember talking about it and agreeing. Aliveness is where it’s at.

When I read the piece by Sean D. Kelly called Waking Up to the Gift of Aliveness in the New York Times Opinion section, I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it.

In our practice this week, we continue to play with the theme for May, No Time to Rush and in particular, allowing things to unfold in the time they take…whatever that is.

This is not easy if you are a worrier like me.

I’ve been a worrier as long as I can remember. My sweet mom used to give me strands of smooth worry beads to carry in my pocket to help ease the thread of anxious thoughts. Once she gave me a broad flat smooth stone with a divot in the center for my thumb. I rubbed it so hard, I broke it in half.

As we move to a new stage of the global pandemic, I’m noticing a pull toward rushing into everything I’ve missed in the past 14 months AND a fear that we will move too quickly. Simultaneously, as I’m healing the broken bones in my foot, I both want to get dancing and hiking and swimming in the river as soon as possibly possible AND I want to give my body the time it needs to heal fully. In both cases, the pandemic and my healing, there is no time to rush.

This is a post I wrote two years ago about this topic.

I had a dream that I died. Or that I was about to die. I had gotten some kind of diagnosis and (true to my food-centric, vegetarian form) the plan was to eat my lunch salad, then take a pill that would end my life.

This might sound like a bummer of a dream but it wasn’t. First, I was overjoyed to wake up. Then I was intensely aware of the unspeakable sweetness of living…and of its impermanence.

Since The Dream, I’ve been renegotiating my relationship to time. I’ve been paying attention to when I rush through, scrabble over, gobble up my life. I’m doing my best to slow down, savor more, embody presence.

Sometimes it goes better than others.