I sit on a bench in my backyard everyday, silently observing what nature is doing. In these cold season, I'm well familiar with the dormancy of grasses that grew before my eyes just a few months ago. And the trees, their greenery stained the dew with their luscious green. But now they are dormant. The three of them. You see, there is something about sitting still long enough that the world stops performing and just simply is. Not like it was performing before. I was the one who stopped performing. Clearly, the yard doesn't know I'm watching. The grass doesn't straighten itself. The trees don't rehearse their sway. Everything here, just unselfconsciously alive, and I find myself quietly undone by it all.

As the wind blows from time to time, the wind chimes chime and the branches bend to the wind's blowing. There seems to be no single sense of reluctance or negotiation. There’s just this immediate, complete obedience without protest. I am ever so in awe of how nature does not fight the weather. It receives it. It becomes it. I stare at the branches and they don’t brace themselves against the gust while calling the gust an enemy. It simply moves, and in moving, it demonstrates something I have spent decades trying to learn: that all my ‘gra gra’, all my resistance is not strength. It was never strength at all. We have been taught to show all our muscles when we just needed pure understanding. The understanding that we are not separate from it all. That the most alive thing in the yard is also the most surrendered thing in the yard, it calls the structure of inner resistance— the propped up ego into check.

Oh the birds! Let me tell you! The birds have started to visit the feeder and my supplies are running short. This one I’m looking at— a cardinal, it would appear that it never complained about how cold the earlier month has been. None of them could have language for complaint. They just didn’t show up to grace this shed. And now, they just arrived, ate what was there, and flew away again to only-god-knows-where. I'm brought to my knees in abject recognition of how pure and simple everything is. The birds didn't earn the feeder. They didn’t work for it. They didn't deserve it more today than yesterday. They just showed up, and the feeder was there. Why did I even buy it? I thought I was the one choosing to bring beauty into this backyard. But lil ol me doesn’t see sometimes that I’m moved in ways I couldn’t possibly know. I’m brought to my knees again at this recognition. It's the simple formula — if it's happening, it is just pure mystery.

Oh, how oh, can I be in partnership with it rather than complain, grumble, murmur about the cruelty of the world? The nincompoops who fail to pick up the dog poop after themselves. The stranger who is perceived to be rude. The morning that didn't go as planned. I catch myself mid-murmur sometimes, mid-sentence in some internal trial where I am simultaneously the prosecutor, the judge, and the only one in the courtroom. And I have to ask: what exactly am I protecting? What territory am I defending that was ever truly mine? Isn't his rudeness the beauty of a god that takes the shape of rudeness? Isn't the chaos we see in the world the perfect setup for wonder to take full shape? I don't mean this as spiritual bypass …like a tidy reframe to avoid the sting of things. I mean it as something far more unsettling: that the whole theater of difficulty, of inconvenience, of other people's unresolved selves bumping into mine — all of it may be the very instrument through which something larger is working. The friction is applaudable, such a sick, sick design.

Isn't my constant pull and toggle to control the world just my illusory belief that “I”, the ego, the small s— self, have a power of my own? That somewhere beneath the performance of preference and opinion and scheduling, there is a self-pulling lever that’s authoring outcomes and shaping days? The deeper I look, the less I find myself. And the looking continues because there’s a belief that if I look long and hard enough, I will find the self that has been doing all of this. I never do. And somehow, that is the most relieving thing. And yet those desires — the ones I carry, the ones that embarrass me, the ones my moral and spiritual uprightness try to go to battle for and against, are the assigned backlog items in which the universe, sic god, sic life, uses to make the whole world whole. Nothing is wasted. Not even my failed ambitions, not the longing, not the small daily wanting. Even my resistance to resistance is folded into the unfolding. Oh my gosh! Isn’t that wild?? There is nothing outside of it. There is no position from which I can observe the whole and remain unincluded! That’s so freaking marvellous!!! You know, marvellous as in... ‘marvel’ + ‘us’

Today, like every day when I remember, I drop deep into the wide arms of this Tender Grace. Knowing I've never done anything my entire life. Knowing I've never owned anything my entire life. Knowing that my amazing success was not mine, my failures included. Keenly aware that I live, I move, and have existence in That which could and would never be fully known. The bench holds me. The yard breathes around me. The chimes ring once more, unprompted, as if to say yes, this. exactly this.

I sink into this contemplative inquisition where the question is more important than the answer, and the answer dissolves the one who is asking, I share these seeds with you, my Friend. It is these question:

* what is life made from?

* what is it that brings life to my being?

* what is my being?

In other news, I’m excited for my upcoming app that I believe could support your contemplative practice. The app, Hold, will be immediately available for Android and iOS.

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