I DON'T WANT TO BE A TREE.

 "I don't want to be a tree. I want to be its meaning." - 

                    from My Name Is Red  by Orhan Pamuk

A tree is only a tree, no more than a collection of molecules, until we perceive those molecules through our senses and it arises in our consciousness as something we call "tree" and "green" and all the other "ideas" we assign to our concept "tree." Things exist in the world but it is we who, through direct experience, give those things meaning - meaning in the sense of definition and also in the sense of value and worth.

Why is this important? If it is we who assign value and worth, those values can be changed. New experiences may add new information so that what was white yesterday may be black or some delicious shade of gray today. It means that I am always free to change my mind. We can say, "I used to think...." or "Now I see...." 

What we call experience is our interpretation of what our senses present. Sense perception transformed through consciousness, arising as concept and idea.

REBOUNDING

Even though I'm used to working at home alone, the quarantine feels different. I'm so aware that I can't meet a friend for a meal or a coffee, can't dash out to browse the shelves at Staples looking for the perfect pen which will change my life. The texture of a life is so much about small daily connections, with people in shops or on the street, walking their dogs, pushing past a couple kissing in the aisle of a bookstore - I don't know why I'm mentioning those instead of the hundreds of other encounters and observations the day used to bring my way. Without them, I feel cut off, lonely, and find myself having to surrender resistance to the loneliness again and again, to rest easy in what simply is, to work my way back to a sense of connection. Still, not a bad thing to struggle toward acceptance, to find the way to rebound. 
   Years ago, when computers were new, there was a screen saver that was a ball moving across the black. Each time it got the the edge of the screen it rebounded, bounced back, crossing the center, heading for the next edge. That's what I feel twenty times a day - hitting the edge, bouncing back.

MAGNOLIA BUDS

I'm sitting up on the bed, looking up and out my window. Sitting up, looking out and up - there's something about the posture - relaxed and alert at the same time, silent inside, attentive to whatever I see. There's a young magnolia tree right outside the window and for a couple of months now I've been watching its buds slowly grow, so slowly I've had moments when I've doubted they are buds at all. But now the largest one I can see is beginning to get a little color and looks like it will open any day. I'm aware of the metaphor - all the unseen energy going into creating the bud, making it grow until it finally blossoms. All the energy inside me, moving me forward without my realizing it, until something happens and I find myself in a new place. Not necessarily blossoming, but changed, expanded, different...

I wonder just when I acquired faith that those unsensed wheels are turning in me and will lead me where I want to go. I who used to, and sometimes still do expect the worst. When did the wheels bring me this deeper faith, that there is always the possibility of change?  When did I become able the break through my relentless self-consciousness and become like the tree, reaching up to the sun, enlarging all unaware?

RESILIENCE, AGAIN

From a book on resiliency:

"Eileen was struggling to get back to normal, not yet fully aware that she would have to reinvent what normal meant to her. She was going to have to come up with a new set of adaptations, because the person (almost killed by an alligator) was not the same person who came out."

I like the emphasis on action - having to reinvent. Not emerging as a changed person - having to take action, find ways to adapt and become that new, changed person.   We are all wondering what the new normal will be when the virus is controlled and we can resume, but we can't resume in the way that was. We have to create the new society we will be after going through this catastrophe.  We talk about bouncing back, but we don't bounce back to where we were - we "bounce" to a new, different place.

Active, rather than passive. That's where freedom is - in making choices, taking action, even unproductive action that leads to new circumstances which come with its own new choices. Not passive in the face of change, not a being acted upon but a being in motion, doing. Even if the only doing possible is making an internal shift, claiming a new perspective.

My image of being acted upon - standing alone, stationary,  powerless, passively accepting instead of creating. As opposed to the energy of choice, the energy that comes from going into motion.