May You Experience this Fully

 

The other day I found an alley lit by roses. Cream, pink, heart peach, orange— the whole hem of the cobblestone was alive with their lanterns. Swaying from white trellises, they looked like women, scarved heads bowing in prayer. With each wind dip they washed the street with their petals, nodding to me as if I was a part of the motion as well.

Instinctively, I stepped off the road and into their grove of rose and cobblestone and just as quickly dropped every plan for my day. The To-Do’s scattering like the soft cups of petals, gathering rain.

I went from rose to rose. Touching, sensing, experiencing, inhaling. I was electrified by their difference. Each scent, unique— citrus, amber, and soft inner thigh.  I cupped the blossoms, and was cradled by them. I was in the roses. In the alley. In the afternoon light. I thought of nowhere else, nothing else, and lost myself completely in the pure joy of just experiencing being alive.

 

 

The deeper I move into my days, the more I realize that goals, accomplishments, and To Do’s are just décor. Ways in which we embellish our experience, give it complexity so we know where the handholds are. But beneath and within all of this is just experience.

The pureness of simply experiencing the world, as it takes shape around you. Of dropping analyzation, or even meaning, to just be in the variants and flutes and hues. To experience the world in all of its minutiae and mandala intricacy. In the longness of shoreline and cello note.

What if we aren’t here for any purpose…. except to experience ourselves in a world that is perennially sipping from the joy of its own experience? To know that experience, pure and unfiltered and streaming through the portals that are our bodies, is truly the greatest gift on earth. And that amazingly, unbelievably, this is available at any moment.

 

 

Experiences wish to enter us. To fill out every corner of our cells, like fresh fallen rainwater drunk from root tip to bloom. We spend so much of our lives striving to escape a certain experience, or to attain another. But what happens when we decide to simply dissolve into what is.

What happens when we experience it completely? What happens when “good” and “bad” drop away into the presence of what is aching to be felt, seen and embodied?

Wherever you are, the experience of that ‘thereness’ is wanting to come in and transform you. Whatever is available to be experienced, right now, is the medicine you’ve been seeking all along.  All you had to do is agree to experience it, completely.

Heartbreaking, heart opening. Blossom heavy, as light as pollen. There is only experience. Lace colored, dawn touched, sweet as strawberries, high as sunflowers, wide as sweetgrass in the wind. There is only experience. The lines of your lover’s hand, the way the peas wind themselves around their trellis, rainbows in the mist of the hose, a swallow diving from the eaves of your home. There is only experience. An alley full of roses. Each one different, in scent and petal and life well-lived.

 

 

This is why we are here. To experience each other. To experience the trees. To experience the flowers. To have experiences that bring us to our knees.

Because from there we can look up and see everything.

So wherever your are walking right now, in whatever place you are sitting, moving, stuck or struggling, try experiencing it completely. Because this is how we can move on to even deeper blooms. What are the sounds beneath the sounds? The feelings beneath what is immediately evident? Go deeper and deeper and deeper. And know that you will be greeted by roses, and thorns, and a heaven of cool cobblestones and roads you never glimpsed before. That you will be wrapped in the arms of the world and be given the greatest gift on earth.

To experience the earth, experiencing herself.

And to experience yourself, as a part of that rose-colored dream.

 

 

Ready for a lush experience? Check out this video guide to my ultimate Summer herbal cocktail!

With an introduction to my favorite summertime refresher (and the true story about the one time I completely rocked a booze cruise, and lived to tell the tale)

 

YouTube player

 

 

Visit the Herbal Medicine making course  or head deeper into the blog to peruse more summertime herbal cocktails