The poking meditation

She’s the same baby. My girl. I watch her sleep now. Her face smudged with dirt, sticky from sweat.
Her busy little body, bruised, mosquito bitten, warm and softened- finally at rest.
Her breath- even, heavy, deep, her tiny belly floating up and down beneath her old tattered baby dress.
With her hair in tiny braids I can see the full shape of her head, her pink cheeks with the veins so close to the surface on the right cheek. She looks exactly like the babe she was at birth.
I will lay next to her for her whole nap, reading, writing, worshiping her, indulging in her radiating presence. I relish these moments of stillness.
My child- never stops.
Always moving talking jumping wiggling, poking, singing, hopping, falling crying, whining, yelling. And me- always reprimanding.
I grow so weary of the back and forth.
I want to BE with her. All this meditation, yoga, practicing compassion. The fruits of which seem singed in the flames that rise up my spine and to my lips when she delivers that one…last…poke…
This IS my meditation.
She is my tiny teacher here to trigger my melting point with one…last…poke…
Be here NOW.
She pokes me again…not later, not tomorrow, not after your phone call or yoga class.
BE here now. With me. I didn’t come into this world for your spare time in between all the other stuff you have to do.
I look at her and can not believe she came through me. At times she seems as foreign as a forest nymph who has wandered into my living room and demanded a cup of tea—and just as impossible.
At other times, the edges of her fingernails, the spiral of her ears, the sweep of her eyebrows- she is more like a part of my body that has separated itself and walked away. In that sense- I feel the distance and...I miss her.
She is only 3. And sometimes she feels so far from me.

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”

“You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archers hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.” Kahlil Gibran THE PROPHET (of coarse)

keep bending....