On the almost unseeable, the prickly and sweet, and leaving some mystery around what we don’t yet understand.
The Littlest Parts of Life
The littlest parts of life. The almost unseeable sights, the nearly inaudible sounds, the most silent flavors, the touch-less touch.
The seemingly invisible masterpieces sweep in sometimes, reminding us to remember that what composes this life is mostly what we don’t see and cannot touch, and have not the refined palate to taste, and can never take or control, or own, or keep, or copyright.
There is so much happening all around us, all the time, that our human senses may never be equipped to fully perceive. Tiny worlds inside of worlds – conversations happening beneath soil, frequencies moving through air, creatures navigating by languages we cannot hear.
I believe that not everything needs to become known in order to be received – maybe some things are here to make the world feel enormous again.
The Littlest White Dragonfly
The littlest white dragonfly visited us today, and four humans stopped, dropped down and drank in the sacred presence.
And it’s all a sacred presence. Whether bird, ant, stone, human, cat, bat, mosquito. Although I’m still not at a level of eye gazing with mosquitos… yet.
We never know who we are really looking at. We co-exist with civilizations upon civilizations of intelligent beings, each experiencing this same Earth through an entirely different arrangement of senses.
What looks like one little insect passing through an afternoon could contain a whole universe of experience we will never have access to. When we look with only lenses of logic, it can be that we have a shallowed depth of focus.
We look at something, name it, decide what it is, and move along. Dragonfly, tree, stone, good, bad, beautiful, painful – we organize the wildness into little understandable piles.
But there is so much we don’t know – and I like not knowing. Maybe the same mystery we can allow around a tiny white dragonfly, we can begin to allow around the experiences moving through our own lives.
All Flavors and Textures
Every day is this process of learning to meet ourselves where we are at and receive the raw, unfiltered moments that we are gifted through the relationships that show up. They show up in all flavors and textures, and our minds sift through every experience, sorting them into piles of like or dislike.
We ripen like fruits, and even though certain experiences hold the same weight and have a prickly texture, they start to taste sweeter. We learn to savor the strange, be massaged by the prickles, and in our wisdom realize that all we liked comes also soon to fade.
Maybe this is another place where we don’t always know what we’re really looking at.
We meet an experience and want to understand what it is while we are still in the middle of tasting it. We call it good or bad, wanted or unwanted, something to hold onto or something to move through. But the flavors change as we do.
Something that once tasted bitter can reveal a sweetness years later. Something we thought we needed forever can quietly lose its flavor.
Maybe part of ripening is leaving a little more space around what we don’t yet understand. To taste before deciding, and to savor the strange.
Our Hearts Are Juicy
Some of the most astonishing and exquisite things are made from the act of crushing something juicy with great force. Wine, olive oil, carrots, essential oils, are some of the outcomes of this process.
Not every crushing needs to be made beautiful, or every prickly experience needs to immediately reveal its gift. Sometimes we simply cannot know what is being extracted while we are still inside the pressure.
That is part of the mystery too – the fruit ripens, the heart gets squeezed, something is extracted, something changes flavor, and we change alongside it.
Savor the Strange
Maybe with time we become a little less interested in immediately sorting everything into the piles, and a little more willing to stay with the peculiar texture of something before deciding what it means.
To notice the almost unseeable. To hear the nearly inaudible. To taste what we haven’t yet developed the palate to taste.
Because so much of what composes this life is what we don’t see, cannot touch, cannot control, and cannot completely understand while we are standing right inside of it.
Maybe we don’t always know who we are really looking at. Maybe we don’t always know what an experience is really giving us- and perhaps we don’t need to.
We can let some things remain strange long enough to change the way they taste.
I love you,
Meghan xx