If You Have The Eyes

It's amazing how the emotions vacillate. Mine have been all over the map lately. Happy, sad, jealous, compersive, anxious, content, disappointed, excited. It's been valuable for me to remember that while it's imperative for me to experience my emotions fully, I must also take a step back from them without attachment. Now that's a tricky thing, allowing the full expression of emotions to course through my body while not identifying with them. I am not these different states of being. I am the one who is experiencing them. Huge difference.

My life is up big right now. My mother, my kids, my husband, a variety of other relationships, various engagements and commitments to what I'm doing in the world. Some of this life stuff is really fun, some not so fun... As in the words to "Casey Jones" from Robert Hunter and the Grateful Dead--

Trouble with you,
Is the trouble with me,
Got two good eyes
But we still don't see.

These things of my life are not me either. They are my moments. I'm constantly in the process I'm meeting my moments, either full on or half-heartedly. Who I am is the one meeting these moments and if this Who isn't fully present, my moments aren't fully met and I'm missing out on my life. I want to show up more, to abandon my culture's embarrassment of dancing with the divine. I yearn to reveal myself to another, to all others, with full on open hearted awareness of our attraction to love and to be loved.

From the book, Rumi--Gazing at the Beloved, Will Johnson put together these words from some of Rumi's poetry--

Look at me. Look at me.
Look at me, even just once,
with those drunken eyes.
I've become crazy, insane
From your drunken eyes.
Amazing trees
Grow from one seed with your look.
Open your eyes
And look at me carefully.
If you have the eyes, look and see.