Stirring Up Trouble

For a long time, I’ve tried to apply the mantra, “Energy flows where attention goes,” to my life, and considered my attention as perhaps the only thing I actually could control or take credit for. In service of that, for 30+ years I’ve begun most days by lighting sage and giving thanks to the world around and within me.

I recently read a blog post written by a local friend and coach, Lyedie Geer, where — inspired by Mary Oliver — she considered attention as the beginning of devotion. Directing that attention/devotion to the cornucopia of summertime life, she inquires what this riotous explosion might be asking of us.

Many good questions! Toward the end, she urges, “be brave enough to tune in to your deepest longings . . . And remember to make breakfast. Make love. Make some trouble on behalf of beauty, truth, and goodness.”   [To read Lyedie’s post, click here. ]

Yes!  A few years back I wrote two essays – “Truth and Beauty” and “Stirring Up Trouble” – that I included in Letters to the River. They were among my favorites in the “no-holds-barred, put-it-all-out-there inspiration to live fully” genre. And — (though breakfast might be better after the trouble and lovemaking 😊 ) — the sentiment and attitude expressed rings true in advocating for the seeds and the life planted within us that longs to grow. I’ve included one of those essays of mine – Stirring Up Trouble – below.

A grove of oaks cluster in the sage flats, their bright green canopy a strange, leafy aberration among rabbit brush and dark-needled cedar. A bird sings a captivating lament from a barren-boned piñon. The first spatterings of rain tap on the ground, while ants scour the sand with relentless intensity, their fiery red bodies at home in the desert heat.

Thunder rumbles off in the distance, and somewhere the air comes alive with ozone and electrical charge. Great forces of creation crash over mesa and canyon, and the arroyo soon fills with red mud and a frothing roar. Clay, stones, and sticks are swept down from the hillsides as the river below swells and turns crimson like blood.

We are one with the body of earth, but who today lives in their body? Bound by the chains of convenience, comfort, and insurance, who dares to get up and dance with Shiva? This world is not a fact! The universe is emerging anew each moment and every day! This spring, the cicadas are birthing themselves after seventeen years of dormant dreaming, and the outpouring of brittle shells from their cast-away cocoons litters the ground. Canyon wrens catch flies, build nests, and hatch their young, while somewhere in the Galapagos, iguanas are giving up food consumed for millennia and beginning to eat algae.

Wake up! There is more to life than consuming! Creation is not an event of the past. It is a principle, a force within the fabric of space-time surging through the seams of form, fate, and eternity. It is here, now — in the sing-song play of children… in this storm bursting forth in flood, and in whatever words you’re too frightened to speak. It is here – powerful and pulsing, pummeling the mesa, exploding in lightning and thunder. Nothing is determined!

When did you stop singing? When did you cease dancing? What chains have hobbled your wildness and left you so tethered and timid? Whose hands wrap round your throat and choke out the chance of truth and turn your strong gaze into something frigid, furtive, and false?

Wake up! You are not a statistic. Your life matters! Creation is bubbling in the cauldron on your forgotten back burner. Yes you! You are an artist, a poet, a teacher, something undiscovered…. You’re a healer, a lover, a hero, the renegade. Pull yourself away from the TV and all its mindless drivel. Cease being the captured whore of corporate pimps and become a citizen of another, richer world. It’s so close.

You are a creator, not a consumer! You are a witch, a sorcerer, a shaman, a priest… something about to happen! Light the fire under your magical pot. Pick up that spoon and stir up trouble!