I love this post by Meg Casey, The girl with the bowl in her lap. In the eloquent, wise, beautiful language I now know to expect from Meg, she writes about a meditation she has been using lately. “I imagine myself,” she writes, “climbing up on top of my mountain and sitting peacefully with a bowl in my lap. And I imagine that everything I need to know, or find, or discover will appear in my bowl unbidden.” She then goes on to describe about how this fundamentally passive and trusting philosophy runs counter to everything she’s always thought about how to pursue a dream.
This post has been rising and falling in my head for several days. For two reasons. One, because I have a strong sense that what I need to do now is precisely what Meg talks about, which is to say surrender, rest, and trust. I’m not good at these things. Not good at all. I’m much better at muscling my way through something. My default mode is effort, sometimes to the point of forcing. I know intellectually it’s time to wait and to believe. I even know this in my heart. But I still don’t quite know how. So I’m fumbling my way towards that knowledge in the dark, startling myself with the noises I make when I knock something over and bumping into things at every turn. It’s awkward, but I don’t know how else to proceed.
The other way I’ve been feeling Meg’s words is in the image of a bowl. I feel like a bowl right now myself. Specifically, like the small cherry wood salad bowl my godmother gave me for my wedding 10 years ago. I feel intermittently completely empty and full to bursting. The levels—of what I’m not sure exactly—inside of me rise and fall as inexorably as tides though without a similar regularity and rhythm. When I’m full sometimes I feel like I splash messily over my sides because I’m not on a steady or flat surface. When I’m empty I feel absolutely barren, wrung out, exhausted in a bone-deep way. When I hear Meg’s voice, it tells me to just wait, to know that a time of more equilibrium is coming. And I’m back in the darkness, hands outstretched, all the senses other than sight pricked to high awareness, feeling my way home. But this is a new and unfamiliar home, the one that calls me now.
