"Birdwings" --Rumi

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting to see the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in ever small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.




These contrasting phases of the mind, like the phases of the moon, happen in our lives. The mind itself is a natural phenomenon. Like Nina, sometimes we think "We Got" sometimes we whine about everything we Ain't Got-- Rumi sees the pairs of opposites-- the glass half empty and the glass half full as part of the same whole, there is no shame in the flickering between the opposites because once you really look at the truth beneath the thought form there is always a unity-- "I GOT LIFE" is Ms. Simone's final exaltation! We all have the flapping of the birdwings of our thinking minds, be them open or closed with what we see as positive or negative thoughts, but at the base of it, when we look into the mirror of ourselves and give the whole game a little space, we FEEL the unity of our bird body, that there is wholeness beyond the fluctuation of the changing, flickering, kaleidoscopic day to day experience. Here's to that LIFE that is always with us and our commitment to FEEL it directly