Was rolling through a new playlist of slow songs on my ipod before settling down to sit today. A line from Keep Rollin, a Scott Cook song, stood out for me. Don’t think I’d ever really heard it before: life keeps widening and deepening.
I think that sums up what’s going on for me right now, part of what’s happening in this project to get unstuck. A life that’s widening and deepening. I was captivated by the sense of spaciousness in that phrase, not a crowding or a filling up, but an opening… expanding…. making room.
I took that feeling into my meditation and just sat with it. Widening and deepening. And felt a profound sense of gratitude for all the ways, seen and unseen, my life seems to be widening and deepening. Allowing it to happen with each breath, widening and deepening within me.
I thought about balloons, how they stretch and expand, and how when they’re tight and hard to get started we’ll pull and stretch on them, rough them up a bit, to soften them up so they’ll give. Felt gratitude for the times in my life (so many of them lately!) where I’ve felt pulled about and roughed up, seeing how it was just part of the process of making my soul more pliant, so I’m soft enough to expand…widening and deepening.
Kahil Gibran touches on that idea often in The Prophet — I opened his book looking for a section about grain being ground into flour, flour kneeded into bread to expand on that, instead opened immediately on the line:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Wow. That says it.
My only other thought was again on blowing up balloons:
Inspiration has the same root as respiration, based on the word spirit -to breathe, to bring to life. I guess that’s what we’re all looking for, something to breath life into us, widening and deepening our lives. ’cause we all need a little room to breath.
Valerie Roney 
I have a favourite children’s hymn that I sometimes find myself humming. Here are the words:
Deep and wide
Deep and wide
There’s a fountain flowing
Deep and wide
I’m not sure why I liked this song as a child. Maybe it was because I liked water and fountains. Now when I look at it with more mature and experienced ears I realize it is talking about an endless source of spirit that feeds a deep soul thirst.
The day my father died, I was walking to the hospital for one of my daily visits and for some reason, this song and another childhood favourite (Climb Up Sunshine Mountain) popped into my head. I was singing and humming these all the way to my father’s hospital room. When I got there his door was closed which was something new. When I went in, the wife of his room mate greeted me with sad eyes and short words of condolence, and tears were flowing from my siblings and mom on the other side of the room. My father had just passed away peacefully about the same time I was singing myself over to him. I like to think that the wellspring of heaven opened up to greet my dad with song and it overflowed to me. Funnily enough, me, the highly sensitive member of the family, whom everyone tries to protect from emotional stress, was the only person in the room with a smile on my face, a song in my heart, and no tears. It was a wonderful way to say good bye.
I’m very grateful for widening and deepening. I use to stress over my mature body shape ever widening. And when several senior tai chi instructors told me that my body would actually get wider as I opened up, I was a little anxious. But now I realize with the deepening, the widening is a soft opening. I’ve never felt more beautiful than this.
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What a beautiful story, and a wonderful way to say goodbye. It left me smiling. Thanks for sharing it.
Tai Chi is funny in how you learn to value what is widening and softening, even in our bodies, eh?
(and I’m still erupting into Boi Hui Jan in spontaneous and unexpected moments!)
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