The Star Leading Us Home: Part 2
Tonight as Lizzie and I were leaving our dharma yoga class, I noticed the star (a.k.a planet Venus) again. I pointed up to Lizzie and said, "Look there is the star! But our house is not under it this time." Lizzie looked up and said, "Yeah, but I know the world is my home."
Wow. If more of us knew that, right? It seems we are all searching for some sense of belonging. How do we identify ourselves in the world, with fleeting descriptions that change with the day or the year? Knowing the world is our home has everything to do with knowing your body is your home. We are in "clay huts" as John O'Donohue would say. We are in these vulnerable human bodies that many of us go to great lengths to escape from. We create distance from that vulnerability, but when we embrace it and belong to the body here on Earth, we remember that we are Earth. We belong because we are Earth. We are born from it and will die to it.
It is hard to believe that we can forget that, but we can. It takes discipline to be in this breathing body. The body keeps it real and sometimes that is just plain painful, or uncomfortable, at the very least. This is why the practice of embodiment takes commitment and discipline. We cannot experience a sense of belonging to the world without these breathing bodies.
Home is this flesh and bone that we are walking around in and breathing into. When we know this, the world is our home, simply because we are in it. We have taken up residence in our bodies that are real and from this concrete, embodied place, we know we belong to something much, much bigger.
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