Precious Objects

From The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.

We love what we attend.
- Mwalimu Imara

-Place a favorite object in front of you, and as you breathe, put yourself fully before it and feel what makes it special to you.
-As you breathe, meditate on the place in you where that specialness comes from.
Keep breathing evenly, and know this specialness as a kinship between you and your favorite object.
-During your day, take the time to put yourself fully before something that is new to you, and as you breathe, try to feel your kinship to it.

I've had such a hard time trying to think what my treasured object is. Not because I don't have one, but because there are three things that are treasured, precious to me in a way that is so deeply a part of me that the kinship is there in the mere thought of them. I know where each is without having to look to find them. I know memories attend with them… and I don't really want to exclude any one of them in favour of the other, for none is more important than the other – just representative of different moments… different connections.

The exercise calls for one, however, so…

Score for Handle's Messiah.

This used to belong to my grandmother, Helen. It was she that first introduced me to Handel, and this particular work of his. We listened to it together, and were moved by it together. It helped us to make an already close relationship, closer still…

I loved my grandmother very much. I miss her terribly even though I still feel her with me at time, though I have not been attuned to those moments very much of late. All of the major milestones in my life were shared with her, because we spent so much time together. All those times a girl needs an older female relative – that kind of thing. It was truly an almost 'primeval' kind of love I had with her… and I felt her passing. I knew when the phone rang and my dad was calling to tell me she'd passed away. I lit a candle for her and was calm then, but inconsolable later – until I realised she never really left.

So… I can't hear Handel's Messiah without thinking of her, and when I hold the score in my hands, I know I am holding something special.

It has a deep red binding, and the edges of the pages are gold leafed… which in a way – now that I think about it – is almost symbolic of our connection somehow. Connected in love and in light – in blood and the wealth of lore she passed to me during her time alive, that she probably would have passed to the daughter I've been told she was going to have who did not survive. I wasn't her eldest granddaughter – but I was closer to her than my cousin, who was the eldest.

I have returned the score to its safe place. Holding it today was really quite painful… not in a bad way, but in a kind of – missing grandma very much, kind of way.

I love you grandma.



"It is why we are moved, even if we won’t admit it, when strangers let down and show themselves. It is why we stop to help the wounded and the real. When we put ourselves fully before another it makes love possible, the way the stubborn land goes soft before the sea."

Not that this is a part of the exercise, but this made me wonder… there was a time, years ago, when I crossed the city on the bus to my cousin's house, in tears almost from door to door. Not /one/ person bothered to ask if I was all right.

I doubt that I'd be so open as to ride the buss in tears like that today, but… I wonder if the same would happen today.

I wonder if the little old lady that picked me up from the pavement when I tripped and fell a few years ago, after I'd had my operation, would do so today.

…and more's the point. I wonder… would I ask? Would I pick up the stranger?