Day 31: Coming Home Into Shadow
- Jay Berghuis
- Sep 27, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 2, 2024
It’s time to drive back down Left Hand Canyon to my temporary home in our community guestroom. A set of gnarly stairs keep me from getting back in my own bed with my man of 52 years. So here I am. Looking up expectantly for what’s ahead - from the shadows of my wheelchair at Silver Sage Village, 1650 Yellow Pine.
It would sure be easier to bask and bury myself in the rarified aura of retreat, and yet I know I’m called to continue this work in a fresh season of my life – not knowing at all what comes next.
Diana Chapman Walsh has said: “What if we could sit together in circles of honesty and trust, sit in stillness, welcome silence, be patient, discover wonder and mutual gratitude, learn together, and gradually build new confidence in our ability to create spaces in which to hear and speak our unique stories and find our common truths? What if we could learn to listen and let our lives speak? What kind of world could we create together on this earth if we were able to speak to and hear one another from our deepest yearnings and our most heartfelt concerns and dreams?”
I roll into the days ahead filled with clear-sighted questions as a 75-year-old who lives and loves in a well of personal uncertainty, surrounded by the raging buffoonery of politics and a world in ever-escalating wars. It’s tempting to be cynical or escapist or just plain aggressive. To really work more and be much more serious …
Instead, I welcome playful joy.
Today I remember a song given through me in October of 2013, in Butler’s Wash, Utah, on a 10-day Underworld Journey quest:
I am a song of joy.
It was told me in on the wind, thundered in the storm,
I read it from the rock,
I’ve seen it in the flower,
I am a song of joy.
I have met in it the sand,
In the grit between my teeth.
It’s been etched on rock and wind
in the depths of Mystery.
I am a song of joy.
I have found it in the snake,
In gliding on the rock,
Dissolving my bones of every rigid thought,
I am a song of joy.
I have found my harmony in All that there is.
My place is in the cave, with ancient spirit life.
I have found my place in time,
Even singing without rhyme,
I am a song of joy.
Let me dance with leaves of gold
When I’m very old.
As I walk toward death
To the last cave of Mystery,
May I be a song of Joy.
May I be a song of Joy.
So instead of work today, I welcome play. With climate change wreaking havoc in our human order, I invite the earthy wisdom of the trickster, of playful harmony with All That Is who is fully aware that death is just around the corner. “Come! Play with me, Mother Earth and all her Beings!”
I have a few questions for all you serious readers and deep followers of wisdom:
Where do you find play in your body?
What tickles your funny bone?
How can your work be more like play?
PS. In the following posts, I will be seriously studying the role of play in my life … look out world! HA!
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