I often have to laugh at myself for the company I keep.

No, not because I maintain a cadre of invisible friends of the puppet or clown variety. Though there’s nothing wrong with invisible friends. Or puppets. Or clowns. Well maybe some clowns. Some do seem to have a curious, questionable, disquieting way about them. Anyway…

I laugh because so many of the friends I regularly hang out with are gone from this world. As in long dead. As in were they to walk among us today we’d secretly whisper about them and how unfortunate it is that they missed that Halloween is still three months away.

Writers, poets, spiritual teachers, and mystics who lived in different times (and often different cultures) but who capture and express real-time truths with shining aliveness are irresistible companions. They help me to feel not alone, they shine light into darkness, they pose questions that open new pathways of wonder and possibility.

Wonder and possibility. Also known as:

  • Curiosity and likelihood
  • Awe and hope
  • Amazement and opportunity
  • Inquiry and potentiality
  • Pondering and happening

With their words and companionship, they provide a very alive experience for me of the power of our shared human experience as a connector.

Whether across time and space, language and geography, or age and heritage we are often brought together around someone else’s expression of their inner experiences. This is especially true when that experience mirrors our own in some way. It is also, however, true in just hearing or reading someone else tell their experience or share their perspective on an experience.

And this is what makes my dear departed friends so lovely to hang around with. They encourage me to consider my modern-day “stuff” from a different perspective. They remind me that how I feel in my experiences matters. They non-judgmentally and without trying to solve anything, offer wise words that help me continue to create my own story.

So, with that I’d like to share a little poem from my friend Emily; Emily Dickinson. Who, I like to imagine, might have liked living in a time when she wasn’t considered eccentric for being bookish, where she could have received care for her so called “nervous prostrations,” and who maybe even could have bogged about her observations of the world…but I digress.

I Dwell in Possibility (446), Emily Dickinson

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

 

With this poem, Emily reminds me of what is alive in possibility. She calls me to consider whether I have taken up residence in places like despair, worry, or hopelessness. She nudges me and points out where I have narrowed my vision or prematurely closed off some area of prospective new growth.

I’m grateful to her for that.

Where do you dwell? Is it in a place of such vast possibility? If so, I wonder, wherever it is that you dwell, what might you gather with your narrow hands into that space?