Someone asked me not too long ago if one of the Wells of Being is the Well of Being, its own well.
The answer is absolutely yes, and this seems to be the one to which I choose to go for some moments each day. It is a place to rest, to pause and breathe, to let all else go, if even for a brief time.
The Well of Being. To simply be. And essential place.
I dip and ask it to nourish me, hydrate my soul, and give me extra measure to take with me to share, like giving a pass or ticket to someone else to go when they have a moment.
As I pause, I also ask, “Be what? Be where? Be who?” in this time we are in, in this time I am in.
It is a moment to check in to see if I am living in alignment with my soul, with my integrity, with my calling, to stay on my path in the midst of so much that at the moment feels like too much.
It is a time of the collective and also a time when each of us holds and brings our own life histories, stories, experiences, and imprints into it.
We bring all of it, all of who we are, to the personal, local and world stories being created in this moment, in unfathomably challenging ways, so far from finished either collectively or individually.
As the world turns, so does each person’s life, living in and through the roles we inhabit.
I never went through a time of wrestling with the question, “Who am I?”
Recently, though, I have put the questions to myself of, “Who am I now? Who am I today?”
This matters. It feels most important to ask these of myself as I wake up in and to this world that is asking each of us to hold much on behalf of one another even as we do our individual spaces.
I see I keep saying “much.” It is because the list is so long, even as it shifts and changes.
When I created Dip Into Wells of Being, the ordinary and extraordinay qualities of conscious living to which we have put single words, I discovered a collection of at least 80 metaphorical wells. They are universal and can be accessed at any time by anyone.
They have existed long before any of us, the wells beckoning all.
While they are part of the whole web of being, it is essential to take a moment or moments, to pause at this one, the Well of Being.
To be wholly present to being present, in quiet, in reverence for life, this moment, this breath that keeps on going in and out because of the miraculous organ inside me.
This breath that I wish I could give to others in the world. It’s easy to say “right now” but it seems like it is “always.”
Last Saturday I chose to go to the well of being, to let all else drift and sift out of my mind, most of all, to open a window of time to be with nothing but being.
After relishing new exhibits at a museum, I spent the next couple of hours by the beautiful river that runs alongside.
It is a favorite place that for many years, even when hundreds of miles away, has been my imaginary “go to” place to rest, to stroll, to get away from the madding crowd.
Saturday, I gratefully received its gift of peaceful presence. It felt like my being merged with the presence of its being.
Leaves rained down and traveled the rippling water, some choosing to plunge and ride below the surface, swirling as the current carried them.
Others circled back up the river, as if they wanted to slow the journey and start again, like taking a sled back to the top of a hill to go down one more time.
They blew onto my head and down the back of my shirt, gentle in their landing.
Some went running past across the grass, getting to the edge of the river, and leaping off the small bank like children that can’t wait to get into the water.
The trunk of the tree next to the table where I sat leaned way over toward the water, unable to touch it but perhaps also yearning to blend with it.
It seemed to say, “Lean in. Lean into this life. Lean into this now, this today. Yes, yes, and yes, even as unimaginable as it is in so many ways. Stay.”
We cannot do more than that right now. I cannot do more than that right now.
The river of course said, “Go with your flow, even when life looks like it is going opposite directions like the leaves.”
Bucolic.
Idyllic.
Gentle.
So far from overwhelm, overload, oversubscribed, overwrought, over, over, over, those words all feeling that in their building up they have the plentiful strength to pull one down.
The Well of Being is here for this time, for these events, for these moments. As I leave it to be back in the whole of life, I want to share a bit of the strength it gives me.
One thing I know from reading personal accounts of people who endure conditions in which one couldn’t imagine simply being is that in fact that is what saved them. They knew how to go there in the best way they could, even when in inhumane conditions.
I hope you find even five minutes to give yourself permission to simply breathe and be. It is one vital way we find the power and resilience to live who we are to be now, today, whatever that is for each of us.
Being in being helps equip us to surround this world and all people more abundantly with compassion, love, hope, and trust that someday, someday – oh, the wish list is so enormous – that someday we might turn to one another (and to other) in unifying rather than dividing ways.
Margaret Wheatley expresses this so beautifully in book, turning to one another: simple conversations to restore hope to the future.
May we dream this dream and act in whatever ways call us, so that we can, together, restore hope for a future created through new paradigms that lift up all of humanity.
May we trust and remember that voices and actions on behalf of the highest good for all cannot necessarily be seen in the ways we might be looking for.
May there be currents that carry us to the best of who we are, hosting all our different colors, designs, and patterns as the rivers do the leaves.
Until such a time, may we hold the world in our hearts and participate in such a way that it brings us closer to the dream.
