I am unashamedly stealing a title from a Mary Oliver poem of the same name. I find her poetry to be suited just perfectly for anyone healing from anything and for anyone wanting to live more abundantly and authentically.

Whenever I come across her poetry, I so often feel known in the un-said parts of my life.

The World I Live In - Mary Oliver

I have refused to live

locked in the orderly house of

reasons and proofs.

The world I live in and believe in

is wider than that. And anyway,

what's wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn't believe what once or

twice I have seen. I'll just

tell you this:

only if there are angels in your head will

you ever, possibly, see one.

Over the weekend, Emily’s dad (Mike) and I spent the early mornings talking in the kitchen over cups full of coffee, minds whirling with ideas, and hearts brimming with love.

It is hard to express the affection I have for him. I can’t really.

Like my dearest friends and family, he is close to me in a way that no one else is. I feel uniquely seen and heard and known in him, if that makes sense.

Not “by” him.

But “in” him.

I am being prepositionally intentional.

“In” him is the closest I can get to the feeling I have with others like Emily, my mom, my dad, and several dear friends who hold me in their hearts in such a way that they mirror things about who I am that I often do not even yet know.

The world I live in, in their hearts, is a wide and spacious world where I get to be inspired by their belief in a me that might not yet exist.

I hope you have had this sense of being known by another. The feeling that you are so loved and so honored and so carried in the heart of another that they are not quite who they are without you and you are not quite who you are without them. The feeling that they believe you are better than you are, smarter than you are, funnier than you are, wiser than you are, kinder than you are. As you are.

And, somehow, I be-come what it is that these loved and lovely and love-Ones are seeing. Just as “Only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one” so it seems true that we have something to do with shaping the quality of the relationships we are in by the space we give them to exist in our minds and hearts.

This is a mystery.

I don’t claim to understand it at all. I know some of the psychological terms that could be applied, but they would just ruin it and reduce it to an “orderly house of reason and proofs” that, at best, sort of name what it is I am saying and experiencing but vaporize after that.

Around mid-morning today, I invited Mike to do a sweat in the sweat lodge with me. I really stoked the fire and let the rocks glow deeply before we entered. Upon entering, we were instantly perspiring and feeling our skin tingling in the almost-suffocating heat and the insides of our nostrils burning with each breath.

In the complete darkness, we added a ladle full of water to the rocks and felt the heat become even more dense and immersive, surrounding us and covering us and uniting us as one in the experience of sensation.

Sitting in the pitch-black sweat, we gradually let go of the sense of time and place and space. It is quite amazing what happens with eyes open and no-thing to occupy visual attention.

The world becomes wide and expansive and full of mystery.

Magical.

The smell of cedar and sage filled our lungs.

Words came and went, but it wasn’t so much what was said as the pitches and frequencies harmonizing and hypnotizing us into just this one moment, into Presence.

Midway through, we each elected for a dip in the ice bath.

We emerged through the door as if exiting a womb of sorts.

It had been a cloudy morning and as Mike’s head began to peek out of the door of the sweat, the sun suddenly broke through the clouds and shone brightly on him, illuminating us all in a flash of warmth and brilliant light.

A moment I will not forget. A moment that I will treasure in my heart and even embellish as I go along to make it as close as I can to what it actually was that I could not quite see but am seeing and will see.

“You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen.”

The world I live in and believe in is wide and spacious and held in unchanging, loving awareness.

What pure joy to know this world with another in the heart of another as though there is no other.

Peace