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| Deer in aspen meadow Photographer: Terry Perryman, all rights reserved Used with permission |
For the next few days, perhaps longer, I ask you to take a journey with me, a journey that helps us imagine a world, our world, as it might be if only love motivated us, if there were no greed, if there were no broken hearts attempting to compensate for childhood lack and cruelty. It's a bit of a stretch, I know. Very likely, each of us suffers today from cruelties present and past. I do know what it is I ask of you. Still, I ask.
Begin
You know the old adage. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Will you take it with me?
Here's how we begin. Get comfortable in your body, take a few long, slow breaths as you read this, let your mind find calm. Open to the possibility, just the possibility, of a life, a world, so full of love there can be only harmony.
We start easy, imagining what it would be like to waken every morning in such a world. If there were no greed, there would be no need for alarm clocks. We would waken when our bodies were ready. We would have time to stretch luxuriously, like a cat, lengthening our muscles and limbs languidly, gently, feeling the goodness of our bodies, their wholeness, their beauty.
We would have time to place our hands, warm with healing energy, over spots needing a bit of extra attention and love, perhaps a stiff shoulder, a crick in the neck, and always lying a few minutes over the heart chakra. We would smile with pleasure at the extraordinary heat flowing between our heart and our hands, spreading throughout our bodies.
Like Rose in Wake, the first Village of Ordinary post, we might enjoy the company of a feline companion, waking and stretching with us, or perhaps we would reach down and find the hand of our partner and bask in the quiet joy of waking beside our lover each day.
In a world without greed, we need hurry only because we are anxious to greet the dawn, eager to run into the morning air, feel the breeze on our face, dispatch our chores and get on with the work we love, work for which we receive no pay, work that is its own reward, that gives us intense pleasure.
But first, perhaps we'd sit with a cup of tea, wrap our hands around a mug the artisan, our neighbor, made just for us, knowing our habits, our favorite colors, the little things that surprise and delight us. The mug would fit perfectly in our hands, a treasure we enjoy every single morning with gratitude and love.
We might cut ourselves a slice of yesterday's bread, baked fresh in our neighborhood bakery, butter it with sweet creamery butter we ourselves churned, butter that came from a cow whose name and temperament we know well, whose flanks we have laid our cheek against as we milked her.
This is one way we might start our day in a world so filled with love we can barely imagine it.
Share your vision
If we lived in such a world, how would you waken each morning? I encourage you to vision it with me, either here in the comments, or better still, on your own blog, wherever you create. Share your vision with the rest of the world. If you do so, please post a link here, so the rest of us can read your vision, partake of it too.
What we visualize we can make real.
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We make peace in a million small ways every day.
All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.
6 comments:
How might I awake in a greed-less morning? I began by looking at how I wake up now. My first moment of awareness is of city noise outside... delivery and garbage trucks, buses, trains, cars, voices. Next, I check my mental calendar... is it a work day? If it is, my body shifts into a familar tension-filled rhythm, and the morning wears on.
I don't recall waking with a sense of greed, but certainly stress and fatigue sometimes, and wishful thinking that maybe I wouldn't have to go to work that day. If I woke in a world where I work for joy instead of money... well, my limited imagination takes me quickly to a place where I have won the lottery and have financial freedom to work as it pleases me, and not as I must to survive.
Stretch my imagination... a world without greed or hurtful history...
I've been sitting here for ten minutes thinking about this, and for the life of me, I can't quite find my way to a greedless, hurtless world. Each time I start down a path, I stumble over rocks and bills to be paid, and that sends me back to a reality of living to work to pay the bills, instead of living.
I long for a world of peace, a life in the Village of Ordinary. But that dream... I can never hold onto it. I can do the visualizations. I can consider a peaceful world without greed or lust for power. I am aware that around the globe people are working towards peaceful solutions. I can imagine the big picture of peace. What is harder is imagining my individual world of peace.
May I spend my new year stretching my own possibilities, because peace, after all, begins with me.
I'll go back to your premise... imagine it.... imagine my world if I was motivated only by love.
I would wake to sounds, not noises. I would hear morning sounds as I hear music... individual notes creating a rhythm of sounds together. My waking wouldn't be jarred by the sounds, but would join in and become part of the melody of life outside, and it would energize me.
My body would wake rested. I would consider the plans for the day and smile. I would go to my creative studio, which lately I see as a wonderful treehouse, and I would create... music, stories, art. When the time came, my partner and grandgirls and their friends would join me and we would do it together. And when their parents came to pick them up, they would join us for a short while before all going home.
We would learn to play instruments and learn to make all kinds of music, and we would sing songs with beautiful sounds that resonate in our bodies and create good energy. We would dance and laugh and delight in the sounds we can make. We would get paint and pastels all over our fingers from drawing pictures.
We would draw, paint, stencil, stamp, sculpt, blow bubbles. We would be together, and that alone would make us happy.
Too much foo-foo la la la.... perhaps, but that's imagination! My world of love has already begun. Now... if I could just figure out the rest of it all...
We would begin the day knowing that we are surrounded by those who have our (and their) own best interests at heart and everything--everything!--will be okay. Not always easy. Not always without conflict. But workable and full of good will and companionship. And good food and coffee. :)
What an amazing, lovely, and powerful vision. Thank you for this gift on the first day of a new year. May every day of yours start with such peace and abundance and love.
Sharon, thank you so much for taking time to respond and comment at length. It means a great deal to me when I feel we are connecting at some level through these visions and words.
I particularly appreciate how you shared your response to the suggestion of visioning a new way, how difficult that was, and how you spun for a bit in what is your reality now. Thank you for sharing the discomfort you felt.
Thank you, too, for returning later and sharing your vision of what might be, if you worked for love and joy instead of for money. I am blown away by your tree-house studio! I want that! Magical.
Wanda, yes indeed, good food and coffee. Always. I appreciate your understanding that we would not live without conflict, "but workable and full of good will and companionship," because in a world without greed, like the Ladakhi, we would be interested in resolving our conflicts amicably. We would be trained in peaceful conflict resolution from the get-go. Thank you for sharing this important insight.
Deb, welcome back, and you are most welcome. I hope 2012 proves a far more peaceful year, with little of the loss and grief you have experienced the last few years, and much more of the sunshine you crave.
Lovely! Even if we don't live in this world right now, I love the idea of beginning each day by taking a moment to inhabit my own skin and honor this vessel for what it is, checking in and giving extra attention where it is needed.
As for my feline companion, she tends to be the one most anxious to get me up, if only to fill her bowl! ;-) Happy New Year!
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