they asked her,
“what is the key to saving the world?”
she answered,
“you. you are the key. heal yourself, know yourself, make yourself whole and free. release all limits so that your love can flow unconditionally for yourself and the world. this will open the heaven of your heart and it will guide you without fail.”
~yung pueblo
I am indelibly attracted to writers who commit to lowercase letters. e.e. cummings, bell hooks, john a. powell, yung pueblo. Part of me likes the way they write profoundly about things that really matter with a slight dismissal of the rules. Another part of me just loves the sweetness of the lowercase alphabet. It reminds me of writing my letters in one of those wide lined books in kindergarten.
In this particular poem, I am struck that yung pueblo calls on the bodhisattva within as the “one who knows.” I also love that she is the one who answers—the divine feminine. This interior space is simultaneously hidden and infinitely apparent. It is reminiscent of the trick Brahma, the Hindu god, played on humans. Instead of giving us the sky, the oceans, or the mountains, he hid human divinity deep within so that we would have to discover it there. It is the part of each of us connected to the greater whole, to the divine unfolding, that we must access in order to live fully into the truth of the truth of ourselves as well as acknowledge it in everyone else. Even if we didn’t ask for it, I imagine many of us are spending more time with ourselves in the last 76 or so days than we had planned. I am finding some rough edges in my being; the parts of me that are impatient with my beautiful boys or the parts that don’t like being so constantly visible to everyone I live with. I am grumpy in the mornings, and I swear too much.
And yet, the rough edges are my teachers. They remind me continually of what I long to be, how I long for the smallest but most powerful nugget of my being to shine forth and “open the heaven of my heart” to all the world. Well, I would at least like to start by opening that heaven to my people, to my family, but probably most especially to myself. How are you doing with yourself? With the ones you live with and the ones you love? I hope you are finding gentleness somewhere in the fray, even if the day was bookended by uncaffeinated crankiness. However you show up, you are just the one you are looking for.
This is the piece I won in the recent OL art auction. It reminds me of the Inner Eye. {piece by Susan Budge}