Speaking Quiet Truths

I took a painting class over the last month. It has changed the way I see. 

What used to be a “red box” is now at first one of a million shades of red, and then as the quiet looking deepens, becomes a gradation of purple-reds in the shadows, and a rainbow of yellow-reds where the sunlight etches into the painted wood grain. Colors have temperature now, and texture, thickness and contrast. A walk in the woods is like going to the Louvre. We live in a world painted by god in a pallet that changes even as we look.

Ayurveda has done the same thing for me to food. Fruit was sweet or tangy. Vegetables where bitter. Now that I eat for health, balance and energy, everything I eat is a piece of the life-force of the universe. It has color, and texture, properties which it will bring or remove from me, or add to my life. My hunger for food is now more like my hunger for truth or beauty. It is not about making the pain go away, it is a way to connect to my own essence.

The same is true about NVC. It has changed my relationship to thought and speech. I used to use words to carry my meaning, but that is like carrying fish from the market in a Rembrant. NVC has shown me that we live in a deep web of interconnectedness and although we can choose to just react to the situations we stumble into, the real gift is know how our deepest truth creates the very situations that many of us feel victim to. Knowing my part in creation empowers me to shape my life as perfectly as possible at my current level of self-truth-telling.

I worked with a couple yesterday that had a fight about their baby’s crying. They each reacted to the situation as though it was not a baby crying, but some creation of their spouse made just to annoy them. As we worked the moments through, slowly, sinking deeper and deeper through the layers of each of their internal truths, we came to the place where they could have been creators of connection and intimacy. As is so often the case, at this deeper level, they were in deep agreement about the very thing they had fought about for days.

I’m coming to think of “maturity” as sinking deeper and deeper into the truth of each moment, so that food, color, thought and feelings break apart into their composite parts and reveal the underlying beauty of each moment.