Change
by Alisha Chapin MA
Have you noticed that the ocean holds everything without holding onto anything? This is a proper way to hold the changes that occur. Holding our breath does not work long term, and you can’t only inhale and refuse to exhale. Everything comes and goes. In stillness there is still breath. In a desert there is water living in the catci and in the animals, and being distributed into delicate petals of the desert flower. We need all the parts. The sunken ships, the dolphins, and even where the sea meets its edge as crashing waves. But the crash does not destroy the ocean. The ocean still Is, and it is always (in all-ways) letting go. It delivers star fish, sea glass, a dead seal, even it offers itself up to become rain. It gives up willingly whatever is on the tide. And so we could be so generous, so understanding that we are not really changed by the coming and going of the tide. There is an untouchable part of us that maintains and persists even if one were to lose a limb. There is a piece of you that Is always…. And yet when you lean into even that… you will find change. “I always love coffee!” Until you find a time of day, a year that you don’t. But something persists beyond our preferences. Something pulls at the tides and pulls at us, and reveals different lives as the water fills up, stirs things up, and then recedes. Help me celebrate the comings and goings. Help me know there is a place “beyond right and wrong” (Rumi) where everything IS, beyond our opinion of it. Exhale, relax knowing this too is okay. At the heart of you some part has not changed, and at the heart of that some part of you is always being revealed and hidden at any given moment. The truth is, “it is as it is”, and holding the space for it to be as it is, is like the ocean holding everything, and yet holding onto nothing.
