What we are scared to let in, what we resist, go to war with, and ignore, may be our softest sweetest self. I am spending this week with my softest sweetest self farm sitting for friends. I am caring for a small herd of cattle, a flock of meat birds, some chickens and ducks, a dog, and a chrysalis. It’s summer and the cattle have pasture to eat so the care they all need is minimal. I have a sick chicken on the porch in a box. Her legs don’t seem to be working. I’ve been feeding her out of my hand and wondering what is wrong, and stroking her back and taking her outside to sit in the grass sometimes. She’s scheduled to be slaughtered next month, but for today I’m rooting for her to live and learn to walk again.
How vulnerable life is, always being born and dying, eating and being eaten. We are part of such a sensitive and changing landscape. A robin has a nest up in the corner of the roof. She nudged one of her babies out yesterday, the little thing old enough to fly, but just barely. The monarch chrysalis hangs by a thread off the screen placed over a glass tank. New gold jewels appearing along its crease in the last day. Soon the green wrapping will begin to thin and become wing. After chores this morning I curled back in bed, my chest aching and sore as new layers of held and stiff tissue begin to soften. This is a precious and vulnerable world.
It just is. We are here only temporarily. Here to feel and sense and see and meet the life that we are in the life all around us. Any attempts to make it otherwise, to think we can somehow escape what is vulnerable and still get the good stuff, what ever we think that is: are crazy. And all of us, all our soft sweet selves, have been knocked around in our lives, not always had our needs met, needed to tighten against our environments in different ways, build misunderstandings out of this tightening and then developed habitual patterns that reinforced both the tightening within and the misunderstanding all around.
And so it is. So when we meet our own hurt, our new thin wings, our paralyzed legs, our broken hearts, may we be gentle. Whatever brought us to where we are right now, may we respect this experience as it unfolds. Trying to avoid what is vulnerable not only doesn’t work in the long run, but causes deeper hurt and numbness.
May we find strength to be present with our vulnerability. Not the strength of will, or force, or demand, but the strength of tenderness. May we be as tender as we are vulnerable. May we come to know that what we are is not so much vulnerable in the way of weak or undefended or at risk, but what we are is tender in the way of open, present, and always becoming.
Exploration
Take some time to sit and watch the natural world. Sit on your stoop in your neighborhood, or hike into the woods and take time to just be there, noticing the life in front of you, in the corner of your eye, and behind you. Use your eyes, but also use your other senses. And listen and look within as well, life is moving and unfolding inside your skin as much as it is all around you. What do you notice? What is the feel of the place? What seems vulnerable to you? Does each living thing seem to exist apart or is there a relationship unfolding between and through what you notice? There isn’t any right answer. There isn’t any experience to have. Just the willingness to open to the life in your life is enough.
