Sometimes, smile, Life seems to just kick you in the shins. Or at least that is how unplanned pauses feel. Not having two numbers brought my little website down. A night and then today where an upper respiratory and sinus infection decided they too would come and play. Unplanned pauses. And maybe the whisper is in the word “unplanned.” Maybe to plan and actually cultivate pauses, the kick to the shins would instead be the sound of heels clicking in a childlike dance. The words below, arrived by email as I prepared for bed. May they touch your heart….and may all your pauses be planned and wild!

In the Wild

 The path is life, and the purpose of life is to live it: to be soothed by its waters, still flowing, and warmed by the sun that reaches those who stand boldly in the open. Live this moment, and life stretches into eternity, revealing the stars flung in the vastness of your night. Hold open what it means to be alive and still breathing, despite all that has burned away in your living through fire.

Dare you sweep up the ashes, whittle and sand the charred pieces, and make a smooth mound of yourself—a mound that, if breathed upon, will float you back to the silence of your beginnings? Your arrival is now, landing on a new shore, a lifeline cast beyond anything imposed by the shadows of what appeared as mountains, beyond the distorted reflections in puddles that seemed to be watering holes, and past the fuel of desire mistaken for the sun. Might your fear be the onset of freedom from your beliefs, causing tremors, or the fear that you are still breathing after having spent your generous years at wishing wells?

Might your fear be that breathing in and breathing out is too simple of a contribution to the great, unsurpassed journey of life? No need to gather your breath and store it in your belly. Your breath is to be heard in the wild nature of all things. Like a bird’s song, like the call of bison, your breath is to be discharged into the world, ascended up from the earth of ancestors, out into the atmosphere of a million realms. This is life.

~ Zenju Earthlyn Manuel