Who's the ass now?

Cleaning house

Over the last few days I have found myself sweeping through the house and discarding things. Simplifying. I have been drawn to it in the gentle, meandering way a donkey is drawn from one end of a field to another by the smell of a new thistle. More led than driven. And like the donkey no doubt, I know it's right. It's time. 

It started with me committing to going through everywhere in the house to find my phone, without judgement or expectation. And now there's space in the kitchen cupboards, the plants are happy and there's a place for everything. I found my phone a quarter of the way through. There's more to do, of course, but I'm sure it will come. I can feel the weather of it on the way.

Thanks to Karen TheBrit_2

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Stubborn Ass

This is so very unlike the way I usually tidy - a rough wind of impatience and resentment in a hurry before an outsider is due to visit and, in my mind at least, to judge. I think the difference with this new way is that the motivation to do it never went through my conscious mind. I didn't tell myself I must, it decided itself. It's the difference between being subject to reins and whip, and wandering where I will and see what I find myself doing.

I'm not saying be lazy it will come. I'm saying let go of the reins and whip. These are not the opposites of each other. Lazy is something that we do to ourselves too, an equal and opposite reaction when we are making ourselves do something. Like the proverbial stubborn donkey that won't move until you stop forcing it. The moment you accept that you have no power over it and let the reins go, since you really have no choice you might as well stop fighting it, the ass ambles on.

No idea

In retrospect this is one of those cleansing tides that comes after a big shift in life, leaving behind anything that belonged to an earlier mode, like the rockets detaching from the space shuttle, but that idea wasn't there before. Before, there was no idea.

It seems strange, coming from a world in which thought and ideas are an absolutely necessary precursor to everything. 

I'm not saying that's everyone's world, I'm saying that's the world I am seeing around me now like a chick leaving the broken egg. I owe everything to it, but I am not it. I am learning that I am made from the subtle and simple inside. Not from the tough but brittle outside. 

Evolving from the inside

Something that's niggling at me is the way a chick doesn't just burst out of the shell because it's got too big for it. It bursts out because it pecks at it. It pecks and pecks and pecks until it cracks. You could argue that that's an instinctual behaviour, bred into it by evolution over the broad stretch of eons that made a hard egg from a soft one. But when I heard someone talk about the necessity of the chick's attack on the shell, that it's a very active process, it touched something in me. Without an active attack on the very physical boundary of its universe, it would die.

For human babies there is no fight to escape their mother. Sure, it's a long hard experience, being born, but it doesn't require anything of the baby other than to take the first breath at the end of the process. Perhaps the boundary-cracking comes later.

For me what the chick's assertiveness does is to reassure me that those pecks I have taken at understanding what I am have been me expressing that instinctual me that knows where I need to go. Rather than the shameful obsession and neurosis that I thought it was. 

My pecks at the unresolveable question of who I am have opened chinks in the shell of life that are giving me points of light. I don't understand them, but I don't have to. Perhaps I can't. I just have to be aware and accept them and feel the blessing of them while they're here.