bricolage project day 14 [shiver]

Today’s word, shiver, comes from the book chasers of the light by Tyler Knott Greggson.  It’s a lovely book of poetry that my daughter got me.  Filled with the tender ache of love and other bits and pieces of a life well-lived, I adore it and open it for inspiration often.  Reading the description online makes me realize how in alignment the book is with The Bricolage Project:

One day, while browsing an antique store in Helena, Montana, photographer Tyler Knott Gregson stumbled upon a vintage Remington typewriter for sale. Standing up and using a page from a broken book he was buying for $2, he typed a poem without thinking, without planning, and without the ability to revise anything.

Life is often like that, no?  Not a lot of space for revision most days, just moving forward and having to own the imprints we make on the world around us.   No backspace key.   It’s a path of both surrender and discernment.  You have to trust yourself and be okay with making mistakes but also take a moment and move carefully before you begin.  Tara Brach’s latest talk, “Trusting Ourselves, Trusting Life”, speaks to trust and embracing life as it comes:

Purposefully awaken the heart so that you can experience that goodness directly.  Seeing our own goodness is a really, really essential practice on the path.

She goes on to say that the reason this is important is that it helps us to move away from negativity bias, from fixating on what is wrong (which I have done to myself so many times).  I love her question, “How do we wake up to our goodness?”

Personally, I’m doing this by attending to my own needs and celebrating my strengths, not waiting for someone else to fill up my cup.  In noticing my own goodness, I feel deserving of more goodness.  I take myself and my work my seriously and pay attention to how I feel and engage more fully in life.  My first impulse when I hear the word shiver is to think of someone else making me shiver, perhaps a lover.  But on this day, I’m thinking of how I’ve learned over time to find that electrifying essence in myriad aspects of life like seeing a murder of crows flying in a shadowy blanket across the sky, hearing a poem read aloud in a resonant voice, lingering near the edge of–anything.

Shivering with the pure delight of being alive and embodied is sublime.  More, please.