Buckets of Moonbeams in my Hand
Photo// the extraordinary Dorothea Lange
There is a wild animal inside me whose free spirit and inspired instincts pulse with feeling, and new ideas, and crisp dreams, and bright colors, raw sounds, truth, heart, imagination, inspiration. A wild animal that arrantly bucks dreary normalcy and mind numbing predictability - cornerstones of the civilized. I catch glimpses of it, of her, of me, not when I gaze into the mirror, but when I allow myself to be swept up in the vibrant invisible realm of feeling; feeling life, feeling the world. I find that this invisible realm of feeling is where wildness is nurtured; where wisdom, compassion, expression and intuition are free to float gently along the spirit of creativity, like fallen leaves on the current of a river.
All wild things, all of us, belong to this invisible realm of feeling, where extraordinary hidden treasures are folded into ordinary everyday-ness. Where creativity beckons us, where spirits, ancient wisdoms, and animal hearts wander through us; the realm where inspiration and joy suffuse every single breath. The cornerstone of this wild invisible realm is vibrancy; it is a vibrant rainbow bridge connecting the physical and the mystical, a bridge between the earthbound to the spiritual.
If we have the courage, then, at a moments notice, our feelings and our wildness, will inspire us, create us, open the windows of our senses and unhinge the doors to our soul; revealing again and again the heart of who we are, and the purpose of our small but mighty life.
I tilt my nose, eyes, and mouth up towards the blue and white textures of the sky. I squint into the light of the sun, as my eyes chart the journey of the fluffy, bright cotton ball like clouds that sail the sea of the infinite blue above me; transitory by design; here for a moment, gone in an instant.
Upon gazing up toward the sky a quiet inspiration nails my feet to the ground in which I stand, as if mom nature herself were saying, “stay child, stay”. I stay; and inspiration further expands within me, it grows wings of potential in my mind and imagination, and furnishes the cavernous spaces within my heart with trust, and a Mary Oliver kind of freedom - peaceful yet wild.
“the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like wild geese, harsh and exciting - “
On the outside, on the surface, life is just as it appears; ordinary and unremarkable. After all, I’m simply standing on the sidewalk of an otherwise busy street, leashed to the little black dog at my feet, staring up; just another ant on this busy ant hill slouching towards nothingness. But on the inside something extraordinary is happening. I’ve tapped into the invisible realm of feeling the world, rather than just complaisantly walking through it. Joy is now dripping out from this simple gesture of looking up to read the clouds and feel the sky. In this moment I am open to the extraordinary within the ordinary. Inspiration pools like moonbeams, like magic, at the tips of my fingers from the beauty of it all, from the joy in noticing it all. Life. Myself. Everything.
I access this invisible realm of feeling, this treasure trove of inspiration, this hidden world of joy, this realm of inner wildness in the simplest of moments. Sometimes the feeling comes when I stay up too late into the night and watch the passing breeze comb through the thick black hair of the tree tops who stand tall in the passage of time, shaky and triumphant, outside my window. Laughing too, and dancing. Sometimes I need only to smell a flower or catch wind of a bird flying over head or witness a simple act of kindness or a gesture of the imagination or a shared cup off coffee against the cold slope of a mountain under the promise of a warm rising sun.
So many simple, ordinary moments are seamless gateways into the invisible realm of feeling life deeply, portals into the world of creativity, into the wild spirit of inspiration, into effervescent joy. Simple moments that are neither rare in occurrence nor selective in generosity.
Behind everything we see there is something deeper to be felt. Beneath everything that is visible, there exists a hidden experience to be had; a treasure trove of inspiration floats through each one of us, each moment of our wild and precocious life. Our lives are, in there own way, an unending stream of billowy white evanescing clouds, floating through the infinite blue; transitory by design, here for a moment, gone in an instant.
We hold within ourselves landscapes of beauty; lush grasslands of joy, high plains where imagination grows, skyward maintains cresting towards inspiration, and crystalline lakes rich with feeling and creativity. These inner wild places are part of the the invisible realms of this life, this world, this universe; they are the places that, if we dare to claim them, will belong to us forever, because they are the places that we belong to forever. Our greatest potential stems from all the sunning landscapes within us. They are part of the majesty of life’s mystery, the unseen yet tangible forces of life that rush towards us, into us, and explode out from us each moment we pay attention, open ourselves to the invisible realm, feel into the simple, tilt towards the extraordinary and dare to find ourselves somewhere within it.
Inspiration and joy are everywhere, they are but a simple gesture of wild attention.
Please send your thoughts and comments to me via email at erin@erincookston.com - I’d love to hear from you!