By Greer Deneen
I live with a steady, quiet, joyful flow of love and energy tumbling from my heart. My eyes shine with warmth and twinkle with merriment and caress with kindness and snap with “yes-you-can” fire. I stand straight and strong. I move with elastic ease and sureness of step. I breathe easy, deeply, with gratitude for this breath and openness for the next.
My life is a bountiful brook of adventures, of love, discovery and learning. I share this love of living with others – and it brings us all fulfillment, bounty, beauty and a luminous soul satisfaction that wraps us in a comforting blanket of peace at night, and awakens us filled with anticipation and serenity.
What do I do? I bring light. I blow away dust and cobwebs. I dance around obstacles, knowing that I’m being shown a smoother, truer path. I live with the intention to thrive, to roll every moment of life around in my mouth to enjoy its taste. I look at life with a microscope to see its tiny miracles. I observe from afar to see its grandiosity. I dive into life as if I’m plunging into crystalline waves that buoy me up, and bear me along with delight and amazement.
I’ve shed fear as a snake sheds a skin that it’s outgrown, that it no longer needs to stay safe. Fear has simply fallen away, and it lies on the path behind me — dry and hollow, and so light that a breath of breeze lifts and carries it away, never to be seen again.
I have a sense of expansion and openness in my chest, like shuttered windows thrown open to let in the soft, yellow light of dawn, to feel the fresh air kiss my cheek and gently tousle my hair. My heart hears the song sparrow, who trills and burbles his liquid notes with jubilant abandon. I hear the breeze in tall grass, its ululating whispers telling stories as old as soil and seed. I smell the earthy dampness of rotting leaves and the sugary scent of tall corn stretching for the sky. I feel all these things outside my skin and inside my soul, and know that I am part of all this energy, and that it is part of me.
I am seamless, endless, reborn pristine and clean in every moment, with every breath.
This is the life I live. And this is the life I share – helping those around me create the soul love that unleashes limitless joy and bounty in their own lives.
I don’t know how this happens. I only know that it does, blossoming in ways that astound me with their simplicity and surety and “meant-to-be-ness.”
For it all, I am profoundly grateful. Every cell of my body, every vibration of my soul, rejoices in this miracle of a life that I need not earn, but that only waits eagerly for me to allow it to unfold.
Greer Deneen and her husband, Dennie, are EMTs in Mazomanie and deeply concerned about our community, their fellow first responders and healthcare providers around the world. Greer says: “As feeble as a few words seem in the face of a global pandemic, this poem did help give me a stone to stand on in the storm. And now it occurs to me that these words may help others, too – if they can embrace them, speak them as their own, and summon up their own still, small voice of certainty that all will be well.”
©2020 Greer Deneen. Mandala graphic by Brooke Sutter.