Begin Again

And again and again and again.

In fact, begin until beginning is the end. I wrote this as an improvised lyric with international vocal tour de force, Marlon Saunders, three years ago, after my mom passed away. It felt like a long road of ending.

We sang about the long road for a while, and then out of nowhere, the phrase begin again caught in my throat. I sang it out, quietly.

Marlon echoed it back and slowly begin again grew, forte.

I was figuring out how to begin again, my story.

It was unexpectedly harder than being stuck in ending because it cracked wide open the truth of what we must be doing all the time if we choose to live, consciously, awake.

Isn’t that we are all trying to do everyday? Or trying to try to do? It is so simple and so difficult. Most of us exist as the executor of tasks and agendas.

To see, not look at, but to see the beauty and love right in front of us.

It breaks your heart, open. Open to more love, more loss, more hurt. More joy and sorrow. It is a lot to open up to. And it never the same twice.

There is no box to check.

And the whole point is NOT to be ticking off tasks, ticking away the time.

But there is so much to be done.

Even right now, it is hard to not switch gears into accomplishment mode.

It was interesting to me that Finn wanted to listen to my old recordings because this phrase/lyric would not have echoed back to me the mindful awareness message I have been reading about, which says when thoughts interrupt the focus on breath, begin again.

We are doing it all the time because we cannot, not.

BUT, do we begin again with intention and attention?

Normally, for me, no. I don’t. I try to plough through the day like Herculean battle that I am determined to win! Fun, right. But occasionally, and more than I used to, I do choose to be present and I do see what is.

Here’s what scares the shit out of me.

Siri.

This morning, Leo had a meltdown because I told him, no, he could not bring his I-phone to school to help with their research.

He explained to me how the Chrome books take too long and his group is behind on their project and Siri can answer all the questions much faster.

I explained to him that not everyone has one and it is unfair and plus it’s important to know how to dig around and decide for yourself what is important and sometimes you get information along the way that is more interesting than even what you were looking for.

This was met with exhausted bufeddlement.

It blew my mind that for this generation, internet research is tedious, slow and aggravating.

I felt this away as about the Dewey Decimal System. But sheesh, the internet? And yet, when I was ten, I desperately wished there was someone you could ask who had all the answers.

So, I get it.

But now, I am terrified of easy answers.

The over-simplification of everything– from what the Navajo’s ate to who won the playoffs to what restaurant makes the best pizza, is numbingly empty.

And it genuinely scares me– this insidious form of informational laziness, because it seeps into everything.

And complexity is where all the good stuff lives.

Each breath, each smile, each half moon and high tide.

It is not easy to see this way, to continually begin again. But the match that lights our inner pilot light of meaning and love and truth is found in this endeavor.