Three black birds fly by. I notice the braided citron willow branches dancing in the wind as if they are warming up for a performance later. I hear so many birds calling out their news, but I can't decipher their words. Maybe they are saying things like:
"I love you."
Or
"What's Charlie doing over there with that nest that doesn't belong to him?"
If they had names, that is.
I look forward to what spring is bringing or instead is pulling up from the buried ground. I ask Ostara, "What seeds are unfurling in me this season? What newness may I expect?" She won't tell but promises more yellow.
Yellow in alchemy, called Citrinitas, signifies the dawning of the "solar light" inherent in one's being. When silver becomes gold. It is a stage in the process of becoming when one has moved out of the shadow. It could be considered wisdom, a stage before the great work, the Magnus Opus.
What is the great work? The work of a lifetime becoming one moment at a time?
I have been thinking about looking forward, the position our waking eyes direct us. Gazing ahead and outside ourselves, we consider a life of purpose a drive towards something. Looking forward. But perhaps this belief is inherently driven by capitalism and by productivity.
The word inspire originally meant breathing in Spirit. Later in the 14c. It meant "to fill the mind, heart, body with grace." When I think about how we talk about being inspired, it's often ensnared with an idea to "go do something" after receiving a moving gift. It's like we are conflating inspiration with creation and not pausing or resting in the experience of being inspired. To be inspired is a more passive experience of reception, breathing in, or being filled with grace.
When we close our eyes when we rest, we don't stop changing or growing. Change is not a choice. It's a truth of living. When we close our eyes and rest, we surrender our will, turning it off like a light switch, and become breathing bodies; if we are lucky, we may have dreams we remember.
After painting for many years in the competitive and masculine geography of Abstract Expressionism in NYC, Agnes Martin trashed her paintings and, at 55 years old, moved to New Mexico. She began again, devoting her paintings as artifacts of inspiration. Agnes shared her method for inspiration. She would sit and meditate until she saw what Spirit showed her with her eyes closed. In her powerful documentary, she described this as painting with her back to the world. This was not looking forward or backward but in an entirely other direction that had no relationship to progress. Was her move to New Mexico her yellowing? As a side note, she lived in isolation initially in Cuba, New Mexico, and one day, while looking out her window, she watched birds talking with one another and realized all living beings need the company of others. They need to speak with one another. Agnes determined to return to the company of others, where she maintained her new practice and created her Magnus Opus.
"Our liberation is deeply connected to the portal of healing we can tap into when we rest… Part of our decolonizing resides in our deprogramming from our brainwashing about rest as our divine right. We are divine. Our bodies are divine and a site for liberation." –Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance
I hear the birds now. I watch the birds fly and fight. I see them resting.
I feel myself changing and growing, and it is not comfortable. There is an awareness of newness emerging, displaying itself in new ways of being that may not be visible yet to the outside world. This transpositioning. This instar. This breaking open. This moment of becoming.This budding before blooming. I want to be there, already inhabiting a future self, but the future is here now. How do I be in it?
How do we settle in liminality? Becoming new every day, with every waking eye, what if we saw the liminal as the constant? What if rest was the way forward? The beingness that disrupts capitalism that disrupts the narrative of forward progression, that pauses with languid repose, that breathes in Spirit, that fills one with grace in the now.
Mmmm…sounds good.
I had a secret love of being sick in the past because it was a time when I felt safe to rest. Last weekend I took a nap in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, and I dreamed and felt the sun glitter my skin golden through the window. When I woke, I felt like a queen. I am growing out of the ill-fitting belief that rest is not deserved daily.
Collectively, may we grow better with rest. May we close our eyes to the world to be inspired. May we be like birds. May we be filled with grace as we become as yellow as a spring willow waking up from a winter's rest swaying in the breeze.
May we BE more not do more.
"Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, or gather into barns; yet the heavenly creator feeds them."--Matthew 6:26