Lessons from My Porch

"Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you."

David Whyte

Yes.

 I've been pondering this.

What is it that brings you alive?

What is it that brings me alive?

I sit on my porch in the gathering dusk and watch the sky change color from gold and rose and blue, to steel and velvet gray, until it disappears into darkness.

I feel the breeze slide over my skin, and watch it stir the trees and wave my curling, reaching morning glory vines. It whispers too, a music, leaves that sigh and leaves that spin and branches that creak and sway. 

The birds still sing, calling out through the fading light. Their notes hang in the empty sky, more noticeable in the space and stillness. 

I feel it all, in my heart, and I ask myself if this is bringing me more alive. It feels full and heavy and empty, all at once. There is both joy and sadness. I don't know why, just that it seems like a full spectrum of life compressed and distilled in to a purity that almost hurts.

 When I sit here, each night, and marvel at the beauty, and at the wonder of finding myself here, I long for someone to share it with. I want to turn to someone and say 

"Wow" or squeeze their hand or sigh together.

But I try hard to embrace "the confinement of my aloneness."  

I consciously stretch into the stillness of my solitude, holding it like a yoga pose. I lean into it, breathe into it, ask "Is this bringing me alive?" I strain my ears for the answer. 

Slowly, I'm learning "porch wisdom". 

The biggest lesson from my porch, is that 

things take time. Change might happen slowly, but it happens. 

Take my lizard, for example. 

This guy. 

I know, he's soooo handsome, right?

I first caught sight of him running along the top of the pasture fence next to my yard. I got to observe him every day. I watched him change colors, puff up his pretty pink throat for me, do push ups. 

(Yes that's him too). 

He was happy to pose for me, actually seemed interested in me.  After a week or so, I noticed that he'd come running toward me down the fence line when I came out on the porch and he heard my voice.

Pretty soon he moved closer, from the pasture fence onto the fence that encloses my little yard. He would scramble from post to post until he perched on top of the post closest to me, where he would watch me, and listen to me, cocking his head from side to side and blinking his bright blue lined eye at me . I started to think of myself as 'Porchside Lizard Whisperer.' 

A few days ago, he moved onto the porch with me, where he sits on the rail next to me, not a foot away, and appears to relish the sound of my voice. At night he takes a giant leap and lands on my morning glory vine and burrows himself in. This morning I watched him capture breakfast, a moth nearly as big as he is.

And I think; this is how relationships are built. This is how trust happens. Much of it is in spending time in the presence of the other, observing, soaking up the essence of the other. It's allowing time to show us who the other is, but more importantly, who WE are. 

Can we allow another to just be who they are? Can we grace them with the gift of the freedom to go through their own process, at their own pace? 

I was surprised at first, when my guy kept showing up. Now I've come to rely on his presence. He feels like company. 

And there's another porch lesson. You don't have to feel alone. Let the world in, observe the slow, steady creep of time  changing the living things around you; let it change you, too. 

Patience stops being difficult when we detach from outcome and just observe with an open heart. 

I'll miss my lizard if he goes, when he goes, as I'm sure he must, in time.  Nature moves on, everything changes. 

But the open, patient heart endures. And it welcomes in another. Love is all around.

Let it in. Welcome to my porch.