When I was about seven, I apprehended that there was a heart in my eye and an eye in my heart. I understood implicitly that nothing in between by way of the material world really mattered.  The world of belonging however did.

This world of belonging was not just about being a member of a community and finding out what matters of Love.  The path to Belonging sometimes included my sitting in the world of loneliness and the attached emotions that go with as much as sitting in the peacefulness within my skin and understanding the need for my full presence to both.

In both spaces, and if I was very quiet in my mind, my heart could more quickly sort. And if I could be still in my heart, I would find that my mind stilled into daydream and led me to doors I otherwise wouldn’t have opened.

Going into this space of a wider Belonging back then meant I could sometimes receive a gift from another layer of another knowing and feel a still presence that pulsed with the softest kindness behind the veil. This sensation let me know that even in my heart spaces of a sometimes uncomfortable aloneness I was never truly alone.

As a three year old, I was in great communion with this gentle force, as most two and three olds naturally are.  I implicitly knew I was just as important a speck as any of the many dandelion fluffs I blew out into the air. Such simple connections of our inner spark to the Great Nature suffuse us with an inner knowing and pleasure.

I imagine what I did back then was like something of what I happened upon when I met a four year old sparkling confidante named Callie up in the summit forest the yesterday who was declaring candy cane sections by some trees.  “Can’t you see them?” she asked me. And I could!

How do we lose that knowing all in between? And do you ever notice that as we get older we go back to a simplicity in which our truths are detached and have let go of the noise?  When my ninety-eight year old grandma sits with me, I see her collecting those dandelion fluffs with her gestures and kissing every one of mine that ever brushed my childhood, too. It’s the destination that matters, she says.

When I played cloud games with my friends as a youngster, I also understood we all went there at times, and by that I mean trying to find our mystery in the mystery of it All. As I have gotten older, it’s harder to apprehend a truth to my own mystery in the noise of the great Doing that constantly battles us a near twenty-five hours a day, at least it seems so with all the technology added in and trying to simplify things for us.

But aren’t we called human beings and not human doings? And what if, like my Theo, I could be easy to be in my do at all times.  What if we all tried to be more present to our beauty of Beingness that is like a dandelion fluff? How many more specks of our true spark, I wonder, would we capture then and hold while letting go of what isn’t ours to own.

Today I thank dandelion fluffs and I cheer candy canes and I bless the perfect snowflake falling down from the skies, perchance lit up in a gentle swirl by the wind, perchance twirling in the soft halo of a streetlamp as it touch-kisses the ground, and that all came here reminding us of just who we are.

Happy New Year.
May you cheer your flow.

Photography by Marina Mashaal