Wild Creative Love

Microseason No. 28, June 21-25

Sometimes I forget how to stay in love with this life I’ve been given.

I forget to see reality the way I did in the innocence of childhood— as an adventure, a series of discoveries, a story (in which I play the hero!) unfolding in surprising ways.

This is a page from one of my favorite picture books. It’s a Little Golden Book: Little Red Riding Hood illustrated by Elizabeth Orton Jones, first published in 1948. I wandered through these pages, time after time, in my childhood imagination.

No wonder I feel so at home on the soft shadowy carpets of the forest today!

The microseasons remind me to feel the freshness of life, absorbed through my senses and through my direct—unmediated— experience of nature. No matter what’s bothering me, as soon as I’m on the path, light comes pouring into my day and I am changed. Everything about hiking is so healing for me.

Mostly, the microseasons help me understand that there is wonder to be found in the ordinary.

Yesterday, after several days of soaking rain, I found the largest colony of Ghost Flowers I have ever seen— dozens of them had emerged overnight!

As I’ve written before, these odd, mushroom-like wildflowers are my favorite species. I never know where or when they’ll appear along the trail. I love the mysterious way these flowers emerge already fully-formed from the ground, connected by the hidden mycelium below the soil, and fed through the generosity of a nearby tree.

Even after many years of hiking, I’m constantly discovering a new-to-me creature. Meet the gorgeous and tricky delta flower scarab (Trigonopeltastes delta). Their special colorful markings fool predators into thinking they might be a stinging wasp. Instead, they are lovely, harmless beetles, and extremely fond of Red Milkweed flowers.

Such ordinary forest elements contain seeds of wild, creative Love that inspire me to imagine what I might want to make, or write, or paint during this microseason of time.

Make the most beautiful thing you can.

Try to do that every day.

That’s it.

—Laurie Anderson

My contemplative practice is natural and unfussy. I’m not living my life by someone else’s expectations, nor politics, nor peer pressure, but living my life by the simplicity of being in love.

I’m paying attention to what I see— or does it see me?

This feeling of wonder spills over, permeating my home life and my clinical days at work with a peaceful sense of ease. Life becomes less of a struggle, less competitive, less grasping. Today will bring its gifts if I’m paying attention to receive them.

I’m reminded to grow in patience as I believe that the wheel of the seasons turns lovingly. This generous Love is what we can experience naturally, slowly, day by day. Everything takes exactly the time it needs to grow and flourish. So do we.

As each microseason reveals its simple gifts, it shows us the truth: our essential human nature is to be in Love with each other and with Life.

Deep down, we are joyful beings.

Even
after
all this time
the Sun never says to the
Earth,

“You owe me.”

Look
what happens
with a love like that—

it lights the whole
world.

—Hafiz

“The Sun Never Says” in Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, ed. and tr. by Daniel Ladinsky