Last night I said I was going to finish cleaning my friend’s house before I went to bed if it hair-lipped the king. Well, I lied. Despite my best intentions, it didn’t happen. (I’m not sure if this means the king was hair-lipped or not.) Instead, I ended up spending time with my friend Justin. He came over to help me lift something heavy, and then we chatted until three-thirty in the morning. After he left, I posted the blog (which I’d written earlier in the evening), then promptly passed out.
Today I’ve been in a tither, since I’ve got a lot to do–errands to run, a dance lesson to teach, etc. This morning after eating breakfast, I finished cleaning the kitchen then vacuumed and mopped the floors. Phew. The good news is that I thought it would take three hours to get all this done, but it only took two. This gives me time to blog now (if I keep it quick). The bad news is that as I’m sitting here typing, I’m remembering some of the spots I forgot to clean. The air vent return, for example. Still, since cleaning could go on forever and ever (Amen), at some point you’ve got to be done.
I’m so done.
A phrase on my mind lately has been “nature abhors a vacuum.” (After cleaning for the last three days, so do I.) The idea behind this statement is that where there’s an empty space, Something wants to fill it. In terms of my personal, physical experience, this Something is often me. I’ll move into a new home with a bare room and immediately go shopping. My married friends tell me that when they have an empty space in their schedule, their spouse is usually the one to fill it for them. The car needs washing. The lawn needs mowing.
Yes, something there is that doesn’t love a void.
The other side of this idea–nature abhors a vacuum–is that you can’t put something where something else already is. That is, in order for nature to fill in or fill up a vacuum, there must first BE a vacuum–an empty space. Said another way, you can’t fill a cup that’s already full.
While cleaning, I listened to a lecture that quoted the mystic Meister Eckhart–“To be full of things is to be empty of God; to be empty of things is to be full of God.” The idea here is that before God or The Divine can enter our lives, we must divest ourselves of–well–ourselves. Indeed, we must empty ourselves of even the desire for God. Why? Because, according to Eckhart, even our purest desire keeps our cup full. In other words, our desire for God takes up that very space we’re asking God to fill.
And so we must pour ourselves out.
This letting go of desire, I imagine, is one of the hardest tasks any of us could ever undertake. How do you stop desiring? And if you desire to stop desiring, isn’t that desiring too? I don’t pretend to have the answer. And yet more and more this sounds like wisdom to me. Having imposed my will on my life and body in a number of areas (health, fitness, work), I know that you can only do things Your Way for so long before everything in you cries uncle. Having struggled with a number of health challenges the last few years and having tried everything I could think of to heal (some of which strategies were successful, some of which weren’t), I know that at some point you have to Give It Up. Give up wanting to feel better. Give up wanting that job or recognition. Give up trying to be in control.
Caroline Myss says that surrender is the name of the game. This is the lesson of your fifth chakra, your throat chakra, your center of choice, and is imaged by Christ on the cross. It’s the surrendering of personal will to divine will. To the recognition that whatever’s going on down here on planet earth isn’t about your little life but is rather about Something Bigger, about Life Itself. I imagine one could spend a lifetime trying to figure out how to do this–to surrender, to let go, to give it up, to sacrifice what it is that you want for what it is that you’re being called to. To trust that if you’ll only pour yourself out, Something will fill you back up again with Itself and that your cup will indeed run over.
Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)
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Your life is a mystery. But you can relax. It’s not your job to solve it.
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