Leiah Bowden's Page

It is the time for singing. For running into the fields and declaring our names, for embracing whomever we want to embrace and declaring our love; for sitting quietly in solitude and listening.

These things are not exclusive. They are all flavors of being human. No matter what is happening on the outside, what we are and who we are becoming, growing from our soul-seeds, are the matters with which we must align ourselves. In a monastery it may be easier to do this, without the external distractions. In the nursery, where we are alone with our babes in arms, it is also easier, focused in the milk letting down and the immediate need to relieve the pressure.

We have built complexity in layers around us. What is primary – the need for food, warmth, shelter – many of us obtain through a maze of interrelated activities. Our schedules are not “go find wood” but a day’s hourly list of tasks, many of which will not reward us with the warmth of a satisfying belly-full of completion for weeks or months.

The paycheck feeds us and may provide us with entertainment as well – the extras. So we do not find our pure delight connected to the striving for our primary needs. We have grown to expect work to be dour, for our rewards to shower us with light and relief in some other place and time: the theater, the game room, the watering hole, whether private or public.

Maybe humans never did stop to smell the flowers on the way to the hunt, never did pause long enough to enjoy the scampering of a chipmunk to feel lightness in the heart.

No matter what did or did not happen in simpler times, we are living here and now, and our thoughts and actions reverberate throughout dimensions we perhaps do not even dream of.

We know better. We can own the path between and through our multi-dimensional realities and bring healing to them all by the thoughts and actions we enact in this one. Let us do so with intentions to heal and to find the joy in our every day awarenesses.

(c) Leiah Bowden 2005