I Can't Hear but I'm Listening

It felt so good to have the energy last night to get back to my current bird-a-day studies. I love playing with how the colored layers become muddied, married impressions of landscapes, and how these birds seem to be both of the environment and emerging from within it somehow. Spaciousness and spirit within layers. My curiosity is all over exploring that right now.

This week was long and I was sick... and, um, I don't do sick well. It knocks me off my game - and makes awareness practice extra interesting! Especially when I barely have the energy to pick up a pen, let alone paint or write or take my beloved walks (my usual tools for centering). The cold I have has effected my sinuses and ears - I'd say I have about 60% hearing right now. It's coming back, but it has been strange and especially frustrating to have my senses distorted in this way.

A few days ago, in honor of my ear thing, I asked myself in Louise Hay fashion, What is it that I'm not listening to in my life?

While resting, I spent the next couple of days brooding over various possibilities, re-playing conversations in my mind, projecting meaning where it wasn't gracefully presenting itself - torturing myself, really, with over-analysis. Our mind acrobats can be so amusing, especially when our creative energy doesn't have its usual outlets and we are laying around with nothing but slow-moving time and discomfort! Then, yesterday, I let myself surrender a bit deeper into breathing with my feelings and aches. Admittedly, I was feeling a bit better already, but the ear thing was still acting up... and in those breaths, it hit me.

If this little ear thing is a mirror somehow, it's not about what I'm not listening to out there, from some external source - it's what I'm not listening to and acting upon in here, inside my own knowing, nature and guidance. A blatantly obvious realization, really, unless you're blind-sided by your own blind (or deaf) spots - as we often are. I've faced this one a time or five hundred before. One of my big blind spots, or shadows if you will, is trying to fit something in my life into a neat container, when what it I really need to thrive is freedom - for finding spontaneous harmonies and possibilities... space for transformation and exploration. It's what I do and how I be.

I know it to be true because as soon as that perspective landed in my awareness, my body was buzzing with the energetic truth of it - and several ways of possibly simplifying and streamlining how I do a few things for Hali Karla Arts became more apparent, as well as ease-full ways to go about some things in the works - ways that honor my natural rhythms and the call of my soul.

With those thoughts, re-centered in my values and breath, I found again my own sense of spaciousness... and an ibis on the page.