On internal knobs and buttons, intuitive quantities, and learning to listen to what this human needs.
What Does This Animal Need?
Silent days. I like speaking mostly only in shapes, without tongue or vocal chords strummed.
Optimally I require silent hermit hours by the many bushels, baskets, juicy pounds by the week.
It becomes more clear to me, as more moments containing experience are experienced, how to love all my-selves. What does this animal need to sustain the internal coziness of riding unbalance to balance?
I like all my different internal knobs and buttons to have the freedom to finely tweak and tune to the moment. Some humans at some times might like protein in the morning, or wind surfing, or backgammon, or socialite goodness. Some humans might like some moss, or records, or two apples and a handful of fresh ants.
Maybe that is part of the practice – instead of deciding once and for all what kind of human we are and what that human needs, remaining curious to keep asking. Because the answer changes, just like we do.
A New Recipe Every Moment
Moment to moment we are co-concocting with life. Each moment is a new recipe and there have never been two recipes the same in all of history.
Therefore, each moment we can learn to add sprinkles or spoonfuls of the ingredients we consciously contain, in order to create the space to learn and grow.
Some days you wake up feeling vibrant, clear, light, happy and there is no need to add a cup of softness as you are not at war within. And then the next day you wake up and you feel good, but not as great as yesterday. And then the next day you wake up happy again. And the next day you wake up in a shit snow storm.
Each one of these days requires your presence to fully see and add intuited quantities of what is needed.
On a day when you feel a little off, you will require a different inner acceptance than on a full blown shit storm day. There cannot really be a fixed recipe for a creature that is continuously changing.
No Rules Stamped in Stone
For optimum health the wise ones say to eat all the flavors and colors in accordance to the balance your urges intelligently lead you to desire. I like that.
No rules or musts, formulas or exact rituals stamped in a stone on the bathroom mirror. But a fluid, a flush, like the essence of that urge that brought us here.
Sometimes something nourishes us so deeply that we decide it must therefore always be the medicine. We turn a moment of listening into a rule. But perhaps the intelligence was never contained in the ritual itself. Perhaps it was in the listening that led us there.
Silence might be medicine for this human today. Tomorrow it might be conversation. Movement might bring us back into balance one morning, while another morning asks us to stay curled beneath the blankets a little longer. What restored us yesterday does not necessarily know the exact quantities required by today.
The recipe keeps changing because we keep changing.
Finely Tweaking and Tuning
There is never one medicine that fully cures all forever and ever. And if there was, we would be bored.The genius of Life keeps us on our toes asking that we stay present and patient, learning from each moment.
Maybe this is why those internal knobs and buttons need room to move.
Rather than setting them once and trying to hold ourselves there, we can keep listening. Turning something slightly up. Softening something else. Adding a spoonful here, removing a handful there. Tuning ourselves in relationship with what is actually happening, rather than what we think should be happening.
And may we let that continue to guide our moments to the next door until maybe we realize ourselves not desiring silence or apples or ants or hermit holes, cause change was never restricted from happening to our humans.
The Recipe of This Moment
Maybe loving all our different selves means not expecting each one of them to need the same things.
The vibrant one. The tired one. The social one. The hermit. The clear one. The one standing in the middle of a shit snow storm. They don’t require one perfect formula. They require our presence, fully and utterly, so we can notice who is here.
Maybe there is no recipe to memorize. Only this continuous concoction with life. The listening, tasting, tweaking and tuning. So instead of reaching automatically for yesterday’s recipe, maybe we can ask again:
What does this animal need?
And to trust that somewhere beneath all the rules and musts and formulas, this human already knows how to reach for the next ingredient.
I love you,
Meghan xx