Trains in the yoga room, Music outside

My son has lately been setting up his trains in my yoga/meditation room. And these past few days, building trains over my asana, sometimes reaching for puja items to use as parts of structures. He has picked up his trains and tracks, and then rebuilt. While a part of me would potentially talk with Oliver that puja items aren't toys and are to be reserved for special uses, I also recognize they are in a sense toys that I am using. I move them from one place to another, filling them with things, emptying them, and chanting, in my time that I might call free. And yet isn't time always free. For we are always free to choose how to be in it, how to be with it, how to engage life through and during it.

But back to the trains in the meditation room...
I am intrigued that he is drawn to play there. He has his own room to play in, the dining room table, the kitchen counter, the living room, the music room. Our house is a bit boundaryless in some ways and so he may just think it is another place to play. But the energy in this room is thicker and quiet, still, though alive, breathing even. He used to come in when I meditated and sit on my lap for a bit. When I was pregnant with him, I called him my Buddha because I always felt so peaceful, in his presence. How is it we are drawn towards one thing and not another?

My daughter plays music and creates the Ollie plays trains, all over the house, and outside and shines in the sweetness of daily practice. What beauty, I am grateful. May each of us be drawn to our hearts' contents, truly.

Circles

Yesterday, my son graduated from Greek after-school. He is in kindergarten. Always in our years at the Greek school, there are elaborate ceremonies and gatherings to celebrate endings and beginnings. Each grade performed a poem, a song, or a dance. Usually the dancers are holding hands, dancing in a circle. One particular dance struck me that graduation day. In this dance, the circle was always left open. Between each series of steps, a dancer from the left side of the circle broke off and joined the dancer to his or her right. The dancers on either side of the opening would place their arm behind their backs, until that hand would join another dancer's again. This continued throughout the dance.

To leave a circle open, to even purposely and continually break it, leaves a seam of opening, that the universe, that the world, that consciousness itself is always leaving openings for us to re-enter. However broken our hearts, there is more invitation to enter in again. Keep opening the circles of your heart, widen them, let others join as trust reveals.