On Sundays, they stand on their front porches and lift hymns strong in hope up and into the humid Texas air.
Their yearning hearts find each other there – in the enlivened space holding us all, and comfort in shared community catalyzes the resilient rise. The singing amplifies and actualizes the path down the steps of their porches and into the road they walk together.
Their songs travel through lifetimes, and find me there, too, in a moment heightened in breathing history.
I exist in captivated presence.
Linear time collapses.
The past, present, future merge into a river of circuitous grace that enfolds me.
I transcend time and yet firmly root into exuberant embodiment.
In the humble yard of the old church, I take heart-quickened steps toward its weathered front porch, and lean close to a plaque shrouded in bushes and the outstretched palms of trees.
Riveted, I read. In dignified type the plaque details the church’s prominence in Clarksville, a village founded by freed slaves, and through the layers of time preserves a vividly painted scene:
On Sundays, the neighbors begin the morning on their respective porches with greetings of hymns.
That lone line vibrates in the collective echo of Sunday songs carrying through the hills of a neighborhood, which I now experience in brightened awe. A freshened reverence honeys my steps because I walk in an awakened knowing of a spirited past that fortifies my present faith in forward movement.
The reverberation of the hymns continues to enthrall my imagination, empower my soul-listening, and embolden following the ever-alluring call of my curiosity.
In heart-led devotion, I praise curiosity.
Curiosity cultivates the spaciousness for me to sustain presence in this loudened episode of uncertainty.
Curiosity beckons me to stay on the edge of my reactions, my triggers, my fears, and on the edge, I witness my intensified roaring wounds with courageous compassion and healing honesty.
Without the firm and kind hand of curiosity, I fall into the illusion of identifying with the pain, I become consumed with the thundering magnification of spun out suffering.
Curiosity about my rage brings me to the fury fueled walk that delivers me to the shore of the church, where I hear the hymns and rest in the reassurance of humanity’s resilience.
Through curiosity, my heart remembers and radiantly resets in my inherent strength to sit and welcome all aspects of myself: my anger, my grief, my life-limiting insecurities (to name a few).
Curiosity entices me to descend into my shadow, to reframe the external triggers as invitations for deeper self-claiming and integrated self-healing.
And I see this opportunity for elevated descension only after I have erupted in a spectacular fit of rage.
She smacks me with judgment.
BAM.
My free-flowing, live-and-let-live attitude sizzles up in flames and I retaliate with my own hurls of judgment.
Ranting and raving satisfies my ego, and there I could remain, bubbling and brooding and blaming the outer irritation for causing me to loose my calm, BUT curiosity nudges at me to flip the focus.
Instead of focusing on the external, on why this person does what they do, and how to battle their perception of me, I steer the gaze back to me, back to openly inquiring why this flared such a fierce and furious reaction within me.
I curl up with my anger. I create the space for anger to fume and unfurl an answer to me.
The judgment mirrors one I’ve harbored about myself, and the trigger rockets to the surface a thorn of mistruth I hold about myself, and this mistruth is ready to be seen, felt and healed.
The judgment snarls at my sensitivity, my joyful nature, my way of being in the world.
Unpacking the judgment I come home to a core lesson expressing itself: root into radical self-acceptance.
And so the befriending of the anger propels the fury fueled walk to the church, where I root my awareness into my feet held in tennis shoes traveling across the cooling of cement at dusk.
Through movement and meditative strolls in nature, inspiration ignites. Creativity flows from an embodied body, and glimmering winks of ideas arise. I hear hymns, and I hear and see the emergence of words, embroidered pieces of lines etching a path into an unknown and intriguing storyline.
Curiosity introduces me to befriending the working style of my creativity.
Curiosity shrugs at my frustration, at my writer’s block or my inspiration stagnation around yoga teaching creations, and lightly suggests, “Get curious about when you feel most creative, and implement those routines into your day and then see if she sticks around to creatively contribute to your earthly play.”
And so I do, and the response is a committed early morning writing right after I move in yoga, and time outside, preferably, a walk freed from the intention of initiating creative work, a simple stroll to ground into my body, and into the now.
Curiosity gladly leads these meanderings. I take left and right turns based on instinctive hunch, and just as curiosity pulled out of the terrain of the familiar and onto the street humming with distant and air dancing hymns, I once again find myself in a moment brilliant in wonder.
There’s a yellow house with a sprawling porch surrounded by a chain link fence, and the fence hosts a jubilant collection of poems.
Poems framed and protected in plastic covers and tied in ribbons to the interwoven wires.
Poems gifted to the passing neighbors, words rallying in resiliency, comfort, soothing connectivity.
Riveted, I sit on the pavement and read. Kindreds spirits welcome me with words of praise, their own renditions of rhythmic hymns: Cleo Wade, Mary Oliver, Mark Nepo, Langston Hughes, Rumi, Maya Angelou.
The poetry and the hymns remedy any loneliness I feel and soothe the bristles of fear. Curiosity curates this treasure map of unexpected discoveries in my outer world and exquisitely encourages that I keep showing up for myself in that same air of enriched openness.
Whatever arrives, whatever is to come, there’s the memory of hymns, the presence of poems, and the capacity to step forward with a curiosity that courageously meets the moment with a listening and attentive heart.