GENTLY LEAPING...

I went for a walk out back and paused on a ridge overlooking a place we named ‘Treasure Island’. Two grasshoppers crossed my path so I bent over to observe them. The close one stayed perfectly still while the farther one hopped and stopped, hopped and stopped. Upon taking a step closer to understand what it was busy with, a white tail deer popped up from the grass and bolted off. What a gift – to be that close to a deer, to be that free to enjoy nature, to be fully alive on a warm, sunny day!
When I got back home, I checked the meaning of the animal totems online (http://www.linsdomain.com/totems.htm). Grasshopper was about moving on hunches and taking the leap forward. This was what it said about the spirit of a deer:

Deer teaches us to use the power of gentleness

to touch the hearts and minds of

wounded beings who are in our lives.

Don't push towards change in others,
rather gently nudge them in the right direction

with the love that comes from a Deer totem.

When a Deer totem shows up in your life,

a new innocence and freshness is about to be awakened.

There is going to be a gentle lure of new adventures.

There will be an opportunity to express the gentle love
that will open new doors for you.

Filled with the beauty of motherhood, my summer provided an abundance of opportunities to experience gentle love. From the visits with my grandchildren, to the birth of the loons, to the mothering of the mothers and the songs of my classmates, my cup ranneth over and I was abuzz with love’s harmonies.

What a wonderful shift from the harshness I was more familiar with. Looking back, I realized I had perceived the world as a harsh place where gentle things occasionally happened. Now I truly knew the world as a gentle place where harshness sometimes occurred. This too was the way it was in nature, where the bees suckled from blossoms, the birds flitted from tree to tree, and the waters meandered through fens.

Watching my infant grandsons with their mothers was quite magical. When hair was pulled by an untamed hand or when a toy was abruptly taken, the mothers were firmly but tenderly there to coach and comfort them through the hurt. And when beds were unfamiliar and routines were broken, the mothers, and fathers too, were firmly but tenderly there to coach and comfort the young boys through the tension.

Coach and comfort, coach and comfort: there is a rhythm there that is curiously familiar. Coach and comfort, hop and stop, on and off, digital world, day and night, push and relax. Push and relax is the heart muscle’s song over and over and over again. Push and relax, push blood and relax: that pattern is everywhere.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising that mothers and hearts are so closely linked. They keep us alive, on so many different levels. At the heart of life, the rhythm is always there waiting patiently for us to join in. Too much push and there is exhaustion. Too much relax and there is apathy. How fortunate my grandchildren are to have parents with the patience to help them find and establish this rhythm.

Apparently this is where my opportunity lies as well: helping people become aware of the groove and then gently nudging them into it. When I teach creative writing this fall, the beats will be called complication and resolution. All stories are a series of ascending complications and resolutions about how characters face the fear in their lives.

We’re drawn to stories and music because they open doors to our inner world that we’re not usually aware of. That place beyond thinking that is simply knowing, knowing we are all part of one rhythm, one life. The myths and four part harmonies that gather us in so we can get past the words to the tone that brings us all together synchronize us to our true nature, to the one true nature of life itself: that gently whispering amen.

And when we fully relax, and leap into that gentle sound, what a gift!