I am someone that loves to make meaning out of everything. I am the woman you meet that walks into your coffee shop, you ask her how her day is going, and she tells you it’s about to get really good because she just found a penny face up on the street and made a wish on it for good luck. She (me) is completely serious.
I am the woman that sees a single, rogue ladybug on her wall and truly believes that bug came to tell her to go ahead and buy that sweater! because the world was made for her.
A perfect, beautiful peach waiting at the farmers market stall is there to hold my hand and tell me to go enjoy a different way home from work today.
It’s more than a childlike way of finding joy. It’s the closest form of religion I have in my life. The art of finding an omen, a flashing of something exciting out there as if the world opened and dropped a gift just made for me. It’s the pursuit of joy, following crumbs of something bigger, sweeter, I feel are letting me know I’m on the right path to where I need to be going. Where am I going if they aren’t leading me?
This has been a year in my life where the pursuit of the crumbs has felt twice as potent. The crumbs have been appearing to me in the typical forms of pennies on the street, ladybugs, and as perfect peaches waiting at the stall just for me. But they have also appeared to me in much larger visions.
They have appeared to me as friends seated on my couch, sat cross legged beside me, tea in colorful ceramics, having joined me in laughter and silent conversation. They have appeared to me in the notes that have arrived in the mail signed with hearts dotting the I’s and the group texts where we share photos from our week. The splitting of a breakfast pastry on a crinkled brown paper bag on a Friday morning. They are the first sips of that good coffee sent from home. They are the songs, books, and movies shared with I loved this and I think you will too. They are the meals made for me and the scones left on the chair outside my door for me to find. They are the casual but deeply touching this one’s on me’s.
They are the perfect bouquet of Columbines waving to bring you on home, back down to the valley floor.
My crumbs this year are the Do you want to sit on the porch with me’s, the voices on the other end of the phone, and the warmth of my little black dog curled at my feet.
My crumbs have also been long stretches of silence where love used to be, echoes of you’re too much and you’re not enough. The overwhelming silence on a Saturday morning. It is a two inch scar on my thigh that wasn’t there before. The concerned silent questioning in the eyes of a stranger. The sinking, Do you think you’ll be able to’s?.
It’s challenging for me to process and accept a reality where some things do not need to hold such deep meaning. Over the course of this year I have learned there are events and interactions that do not have a magical meaning worth taking with you. Sometimes, the crumb on the path in front of you doesn’t need to be picked up. It’s alright to let it fall if picking it up will cost you more than you’ll get in return.
I have spent the large portion of my life desperately wanting to find the good, the beauty, find the comfort, find the next crumb on the path that surely is there waiting for me telling me what’s next.
What’snextwhat’snextwhat’snext?
It’s difficult for me to turn away from a crumb. In my mind, I am part of the web that we are all existing in and anything that comes my way must have been meant to find me.
Right? This is how I am meant to exist, right?
I feel that if I don’t pick it up, assign meaning diligently, will I miss the turn in life I’m supposed to take next?
But what happens when the crumb that finds you could sink you?
In spending time learning about Zen, I have been simultaneously relaxed and deeply unsettled.
My interpretation of the practice is this: imagine yourself sitting next to your dog. You look over to her, having known and loved her since she was a puppy, and you say out loud, How will I ever go on without you? Your dog looks at you and responds with her eyes, You will. I was never yours. I was me and you were you. We are just passing through.
In one instance it’s beautiful. It’s being on a wave and giving full trust to where the tide takes you, acknowledging love when it’s there and then letting it go.
In the other, my skin crawls. How are human beings who build monuments to the people we love, able to practice and process the release of all personal attachment?
There are pieces of Zen that speak to me. I have felt particularly touched by the idea of “Right Effort”.
Right effort talks about practicing something ( a skill, a religion, an act of kindness) just for the sake of doing it, releasing all potential outcome of attainment attached to it. The attainment is found in the routine act of the practice itself.
I am choosing to carry this with me. It’s teaching me how to ground in the here and its helped me to start. Previously, I would get so in my head about what something could be that I was getting trapped at the beginning. I was struggling to launch for fear of something not becoming what I had cracked it up to be in my mind.
But I am finding the elements of Zen that call for a release of all personal attachment are simply not up my alley. I want to have personal attachments. I am decidedly not interested in being free of all humanly emotions to find whatever the hell that brand of “enlightenment” is.
I want to love hard, without fear of when it may hurt. I want to care so deeply I think about it in my dreams. I want to push myself hard, even if I break.
I want to do all of these things, knowing I will also need to be able to let go. I am still learning that. The thing about letting go is only I can decide when to do it. Nothing else can do that for me. It’s my voice alone dictating the way.
I’m learning that just like we get to choose when to let go, what crumbs we are going to pick up and hold onto, I have a say in the meaning they will or won’t hold in my life.
I’m learning that the voice that was sprinkling good luck pennies for a good day, planting lady bugs to signal making a purchase, and perfect peaches to shake up my commute was always mine alone.
There’s no missing the next turn when life is coming from you, and you’re behind the wheel.
I do not yet know what comes next, but I know what I want to do.