~ Compassion and an Appendectomy ~

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Ponderings, Poems & Practices
    for Living Your Brilliance!


   Don’t try to understand. Be vast and hollow.  Not-Knowing is the space of compassion. 
Fred LaMotte

Dear One,

What is the nature of radical self-compassion?   I’m gently sitting with that question as I recovery from an unanticipated appendectomy. 
 
Self-compassion … my ability to meet myself exactly the way I am …messy, disappointed, grateful.    I’m meeting my vulnerable and tender self as this experience weaves itself into an updated version of  “me”.
 
A week before my surgery I had already fallen in love with the poem Shekinah, by Fred LaMotte.  Now I come back to it with a deep breath and I take his last line to heart….
 
    Don’t try to understand.
    Be vast and hollow.
    Not-Knowing is the space 
   of compassion.  

Thank you, Fred. I can use that.

With love to you,
Sharon

Shekinah
Fred LaMotte

As you fall
asleep tonight,
don’t take this inhalation
for granted.
Honor her like a royal guest.
Make a spacious tent of your flesh.
For She who ripens and gathers
clusters of galaxies
has come to dwell in your body.
Touching the soft spot on your crown,
She pours the Milky Way 
down your backbone.
Therefor breathe the night.
Each expiration guides you
to her moonlit mirror door.
The key is silence, step through.
Her footprints are sparks of dark energy.
Follow them into the void.
Wings of astonishment will carry you
from death to death.
A scent of blossoms from 
the garden of the unborn 
will guide you home, enlarged 
by the memory of stillness.
Neither come nor go.
Just sink deeper into the seed, 
the sanctum where you’ve always
already arrived. 
Don’t try to understand.
Be vast and hollow.
Not-Knowing is the space 
of compassion.