a poem of pause, originally published in P.S. I Love You, a publication on Medium.com

There are moments that hit with such blunt force they blast us apart like supernovas and loom, haunted, with eternal anniversary;

There are moments that sing with such joy they sprout fields of sunflowers in our souls and grow fabled and crystalline with time;

We believe our life is designed for these moments of loud punctuation, so we wind our selves around them like tight balls of tangled twine;

But look.

See those hawks glide like kites over the green hills?

Life is constructed through bits of small wonder;

each molecule heated by the sun rises 
so that another may take its place;

each modest minute gathers into the chapters of our stories,
like a empyreal column of air lifting great birds towards the heavens.

© Vixen Lea 2021

---

I have been scrambled lately. My lengthy To-Do lists and filmy future-dreams are whisked together into a froth inside my brain.

I am approximately 10 weeks into my 6-month-long Empowerment/Recovery Coach Training program with This Naked Mind, and I can see glimpses of it: my end-game; my achievement; my dreams-come-to-life.

It simultaneously thrills me and terrifies me.

Sometimes I feel like I get so bent on the direction I’m going and where I’ll end up, that I forget to look around and enjoy the scenery on the way there.

I wrote this poem to remind myself that if I focus too much on these big events in my life, I will suddenly find myself at the other side of time, stunned by the realization that, as they say, life happened when I wasn’t looking.

We often get hung up on tragedies that we can’t shake; events that haunt us for years after they have ceased their present-moment impact. We let those moments define us; we give those events authority over every subsequent moment in our lives, thereby robbing ourselves of the continuation and evolution of our journeys.

Or we find ourselves slaving towards an anticipated future to the detriment of our current experiences: “I will finally be happy when….” or “I will finally be able to relax when…” or “I just have to get through [xyz] and then life will improve.” We become blind to the small joys of our everyday because we are so fixated on the imagined horizon.

The latter is my current hurdle. I have been so focused on all of the moving pieces towards this new venture into Coaching, that I often get irritated with what is happening in my present moment. The kitchen counter with its perpetual accumulation of debris, the animals with their ongoing needs for sustenance and elimination, the kids with their constant requirements for sliced apples and Barbie puppeteers, Acchhh! It seems that as soon as I get flowing, life tosses in some driftwood and veers me off-course.

---

But… driftwood does make for good art… Hm.

Perhaps a stream without obstacles is merely a barren canal. Perhaps the rapids and the calm are equally as compelling and equally as exciting. (Pardon my ongoing water analogy, but metaphors are my favorite poetic device!)

You know, the whole point of me pursuing this Coaching Certification is to help people unstick themselves from patterns that are not serving their best lives; to help people to shift their perspectives towards joy and empowerment. And I am my own first and eternal client.

So I pause. And I watch the air move majestic birds. And I appreciate the transfer of energy from photon to photon, molecule to molecule; minuscule movements of atoms shifting oceans of air.

© Skye Nicholson 2021