What Can I Create Today?

Diane at Contemplative Photography reminds us of Robert Fritz's question and makes me stop to find an answer on this "window" day.  Today is the divider between two states.  Yesterday, my life was in transition, living in a vacation cabin, stuff scattered about in storage pods.  Tomorrow I will start the moving process into my new home, a place where I intend to stay for a long time, a place where all my pieces can come back together again. 

Today is a blank canvas, mine to spend as I wish, pristine with possibility.  So I sit here writing in the cool morning, Missy sighing beside me after gathering all the sniffs and sounds of our walk, birds calling their selves into the day.  I wonder what I can create today and my mind turns to projects ... writing, mosaic, collage or the new business invitation that arrived yesterday.  But, something else nibbles at the edges with a silent but perceptible push in a different direction.  I begin to feel a quiet that travels down my body, through my arms, onto this note.  Peace.  What I can create today is peace and I can let it expand like a bubble all around me.  I breathe and it expands.  I get hooked on the idea of expansion and try to grow the bubble.  It doesn't grow.  I try to push it bigger.  It doesn't push.  I relax and just breathe and it expands and takes in the whole house.  I try to consciously expand it further and it collapses back to a small bubble around my body.

I get it.  Peace is not something I can create.  The I that is conscious cannot control it.  Sitting, breathing, I can feel it in my body,  can feel it expand out a little bit, know that it could expand out further, but know that I can't control or direct it.  So maybe the question for today is not "What can I create?" but "What can I allow to be?"  What can only come into being when I am open, quiet and receptive?  A question with no answer and I am returned to Rilke's admonition to "Live the questions."

"I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear friend, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you, because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."  
 -- Rainer Maria Rilke