“…life feels as if it’s being painted in smaller, intimate strokes.”
This week’s audio has me whispering from late night at Upaya on our personal practice afternoon. Yesterday we witnessed an ordination ceremony for a beautiful human, today, the Buddha’s birthday, another ceremony, followed by breakfast, wood polishing around the zendo, heart wide open. Hours of sitting, dropping my ideas about things, some days are bright and clear, some days full of memories, machinations, sorrow. The daily humblings, the inanity of the narratives and stories I’m carrying, here to release. This is awakening. This sitting still so I can see. This quiet sitting so I can drop the habit energy again. This just sitting so I can serve effectively and sustainably as I grow older.
Welcoming writer, poet, earnest human
is a natural choice for this week with us. She’s managing an ailing relative, upholding a boundless heart, a clear mind, and a body asking for more time just being. Aren’t we all needing this?Are you also feeling this?
is her Substack—it’s beautiful.
Mountain Body, River Mind, 2022. Mixed media on canvas.
I’ve asked Justyna to share her current circumstances with us through her poetry—what she’s sent touches upon the essence of what it means to be alive, fully wrapping oneself around myriad challenges, while remaining committed to wonder, meaning, service, and love. I wonder if any of her very ordinary extraordinary situation resonates with you.
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Here she is.
I am still finding the vocabulary to describe the changes I am currently going through. Engaging in deep soul-work for a couple of years now, work that has brought both upheaval and soothing to my life, I no longer perceive the world, or my place in it, in the way I did just a few months ago. I keep changing. Being is probably the most helpful word here—and one to which I keep returning.
I moved back to my home country of Poland from Portugal just before Christmas, to support my parents, as my father’s body is claimed by cancer. After rupturing through his bones, the cancer is now turning his once-bright mind dark; on his scans, spots appear as shadowy voids across brain tissue.
My parents have a small farm with three horses (and a foal born on Valentine’s Day), a goat and her baby (born on the Spring Equinox), dogs, cats, chickens, peacocks, geese, ducks, guinea pigs, and a snake. The house is nestled in the forest, surrounded by fields. This chapter of my life offers an opportunity for me to relieve some of their workload, and re-weave my relationship with them.
Through many misunderstandings, we’ve grown distant. Words have come between us too often, but when I drive my dad to the hospital to receive his treatments these days, our hearts talk to each other. There is ease between us now.
For the time being, life feels as if being painted in smaller, intimate strokes. I’ve recently gone through a viscerally painful separation with my partner, carrying many lessons, as such life-altering events do. I’m still in the classroom of heartbreak, still doing my homework.
My grandma also lives with us, she’s always been my best friend and role model. When I think of her, I think of her hands—wrinkled and crooked from years of holding; a nurse, mother, wife, aunt, sister, and grandma. Boundless love is their only language. With these hands, she gently, eagerly reaches for a piece of dark chocolate I offer her each day. “You bear sweetness,” she tells me. And in exchange, she tells me stories, tales that spill from her house of memory like winter-worn bodies streaming out into the first full day of spring sunshine. I drink each one.
It’s all about holding nothing, really. Releasing, little by little, all the burdens we carry. I’m learning I don’t need to hold anything to feel abundant, or safe. The impulse to grasp is precisely what evokes the feeling of lack.
Learning to give from a place of overflow, not depletion—true giving is not so much an act, it’s a state of being.
Thank you for receiving this poem from my tender heart at this profound time.
there are countless examples of abundance in the universe
I remain underwater
these days, submerged.
I have used up
my strength, it seems, and all
I have left—the simplest and smallest
kind of quietness amidst
the raging storm.
I close my eyes
retreat into myself, deep, deep,
into the darkness where
nothing and nobody
can find me, not even
myself.
It is safe and warm and I wish to
stay there. But life was not made to
hide from.
I wanted to build
a bird feeder and mount it
to my window so I could
share food and in turn,
be offered small instances
of life-throbbing presence throughout my days.
There are countless examples
of abundance in the universe, I read.
The stars, countless,
The waves, innumerable.
The sips of air through the mouth, into the lungs,
along the veins and arteries, animating
the body—unlimited.
If I tried, I could never
count the many leaves
on a single tree, let alone
on the forest’s head. I brush
my gaze through and I
feel rich.
Another thing
that knows no limit, even
if it brings us to ours,
is love.
Mine has been
stretched these days to home
within it terminal illness,
old age with its merciless rights,
un-friending,
un-holding,
un-familiarizing,
and I also know there is no
greater courage and necessity
than love—giving it
receiving it, naming it.
Just like my grandma
teaching me to knit
a sweater in which to wrap my
shivering-still body, telling me
my tiny meager knitted square is
w o n d e r f u l.
So I spell it out,
across the vastness of skies:
the bright stars, the falling stars,
Jupiter and Pluto, the supernovas,
black holes—my language
of choice.
If you look up, you will know:
there are countless examples
of abundance in the universe.
Thank you, Justyna. Dear reader, feel free to offer encouragement, love and appreciation for Justyna here; comments section is open. Thank you for being here.
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