Just Jump

Yesterday I took a walk with a friend.  We walked through scented valleys, among heartrendingly beautiful groves of ancient oak and sycamore.  This land has always been sacred, a source of constant water in an arid range. When I walk here, messages are so close to the surface.

Here is what I mean:  when I lift my water bottle to take a drink, the wind rushes across and sounds a low, perfect note.  Or, lying back in the cool water of the creek, watching the herons dive for fish, setting the waterlilies trembling, I melt completely into the water until there is no difference between my heartbeat and the bend of the cattails in the wind.  Here there is water, shelter, food, joy, an abundance of everything.  So too there is an abundance in me.

Or this: as I sit in meditation above the river, asking quietly what is next for me to do, a man and a woman hike up below me and begin to quarrel loudly about whether or not they should jump in.  The bullfrogs stop singing and the hummingbirds fly away.  All is still except for their agonizing calculations: will it be better with or without water shoes? Will the food get wet? (we double bagged it in plastic! –the plastic might leak!) What if the water is too cold?

A pressure builds steadily behind my eyes and throat.  JUST JUMP! I want to shout.  JUST JUMP.

And then the silence is broken and the startled hikers gaze up at me because I am shrieking with laughter.  There is my answer– just jump.  It’s been my answer all along.

My friend and I hiked for hours, and then, returning, gathered armfuls of fennel and elder flowers to make hydrosols with.  We stood outside the car, radiant and flower-laden, and that little punchy-thing on the key wouldn’t unlock the doors. The car battery was completely dead.

My friend called Triple A, we gathered more flowers, and in time a man named Angel drove up, looked at the car, and told us we needed a jump.

A what?

A JUMP.

We laughed all the way home, and in the evening laid out a feast of rosemary cake, basil-infused cream, fresh apricots marinated in orange-flower water.  We sat around the fire with friends and turned the flowers we’d gathered into fragrant hydrosols.  By the light of the full moon we added aromatic and healing essential oils to create our own herbal mists–some for evocative fragrance, some purification, some for beauty.  I had never held an herbal workshop on such short notice, but I jumped.  I keep jumping, and the world I find on the other side is always so much more beautiful than I could have imagined.

dear one–

there is always music

the light touch at the small of your back

urging you forward

a blessing to be found

somewhere–

cast about, a bright flash as a 

leaf catches the sun, the scent

of alyssum on the wind. 

Sharpen your senses & catch the song, love,

drink unseen waters & catch the song.