head for the open

“Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!”

“Easter Exultet” by James Broughton, from Little Sermons of the Big Joy (Insight to Riot Press, 1994). Text as posted on Fresh Day (Volume 18). 

A friend posted this poem today, Easter Sunday, and I thought how fitting it is for this time of my life.  A time when I’ve crossed a threshold into a new stage of life.  No longer bleeding.  No long running after little children.  I’m in that interstitial space between Mother and Crone.

But.

And.

I’m really just getting started.  I’ve shed so many skins these many years and, over the past two, shed a lot of weight.  I bike everywhere.  I have almost boundless energy.  I really dig being IN my body.  I’ve learned to sink into my own skin and just hang out there.  It’s nice.

And I know what I want to be when I grow up because I have.

I’ll leave it there and just let you wonder.  (It’s okay, wonder is good.  I recently got engaged to wonder and I’m stilling having my “honeymoon with joy”.)

For now.

If you want some help shaking out your qualms, consider watching this: