Come new to this day.
Remove the rigid
overcoat of experience,
the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud
your vision.
Leave behind the stories
of your life. Spit out the
sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs
waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.
Arrive curious, without the armor
of certainty, the plans and planned
results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you, new
every breath, every blink of
your astonished eyes.
by Rebecca del Rio
I don’t think I feel disillusioned, but my being gratefully drinks in this prescription to ‘come new to this day’, to ‘leave behind the stories of my life’. I have just arrived on Holy Isle for the Mindfulness for Life retreat, and the words of this poem somehow feel close to the invitation I feel from the island. They come from a book of poetry with the title Prescription For The Disillusioned by the American born Catalonian poet Rebecca del Rio, and I wonder what moved her to write them down in this way…
Landing on this island-off-an-island, there is a palpable sense of leaving behind what normally clouds my mind or weighs me down, and to look around with fresh or even astonished eyes. And while this may be easier to sense after a complicated journey of different modes of transport to mark the transition away from daily life, the principle applies just as much to each day, each meditation, each moment. What if we could remember more often to come new to the moment and to ‘live the life that chooses you’, rather than chasing after the chimeras of our preferences?
I really love that possibility, ‘live the life that chooses you’. I may not be so in touch with choosing the more difficult elements of my life: the unwanted pains in my body, the heartaches, the conundrums and losses, but as they’re here, it’s clear that these are part of the life that chooses me. And I can choose to live it as gracefully as I can, to receive its sometimes capricious gifts and turn up for it fully – for as Rob Nairn said about the body: “We don’t have a spare one in the cupboard”. The one wild and precious life that chooses me, and you – let’s live it!
PS. If you’d like to give yourself the gift of a retreat to immerse yourself more fully in practice, there are many to choose from – and if you’re struggling to afford it, why not ask for some support?