What If We Awoke And Said...

Spring calls us. There are so many invitations it extends to us to stop and be awed. And yet in our busyness, it is so easy to decline the invitation or to miss it altogether. But as I will sometimes say in my meditations, "there is no moment exactly like this moment," there is also no spring exactly like this spring... at this particular age, with these particular conditions, with these people in my life. I am reminding myself not to miss it. These particular tulips found in Princeton over the weekend, as Mike and I went for a drive and a coffee date, made me veer off the sidewalk to say hello. When my kids and I were in Florida visiting my mom last week, there were flowers everywhere. Hibiscus and Bougainvillea and Impatiens could be found on every block. Now I appreciate them, but when I lived there for a brief period of my life, I'm embarrassed to say I stopped noticing them because they were always around. That's not the case in the Northeast and so I can be easily awed every season. Why does it matter that we experience awe?

I'm not a traveler, but I am guessing people who travel are drawn to being awed again and again. To see something fresh that makes us pause, whether it is a landscape, the culture of a place, music/art/dance, architecture, food -- so many things that can strike our senses with a gasp of delight and the feeling of something much greater at work. This matters because it brings us humility and connects us to our innate appreciation for life. 

My invitation this week is to access awe in the everyday moments of our ordinary existence. My 14-17 year old self could not do that in Florida, but I have been training my adult self in this. This is what meditation does. I don't think we can be awed if we aren't present, right? We don't need to travel to have our breath taken away. We can be enraptured by something simply by slowing down, opening our eyes, and letting in a color, a shape, a sound, a movement, a touch, a word. But only we can let it in. No one can do it for us. We could travel and still fail to let in what is before us. We can be loved and fail to let it touch us. It happens all the time and that's okay, too, because when we realize it, we know the difference. Once we know the difference, we can choose. What if we awoke and said, "today, may I make myself available to be awed by what I witness."

While we can't make ourselves feel awe, rather it comes upon us, we can be awake and open to the experience of it by our presence alone. We can choose to see like a photographer sees -- the details, the angles, the shadows, the variations. It's all there for us if we want it.

Wishing everyone an awe-inspired spring week.

🌷
Jean