Imagination

Like everyone else, I've been reading Eckhart Tolle lately. However, unlike everyone else (although I'm sure there are a few), I've been applying it not only to my own life, but to my life as it is with Rohnan, my son. And unlike every other self help book I've read, he seems to be able to break through my campagne crust of a cynicism I've been nursing since about puberty.
Living in Santa Cruz, my cynical self lives in a state of perpetual flux because at one point I desire to be more authentic than all the wide loving, outdoorsy types here, and on the other hand I wonder if perhaps they are on to something. Is that why I'm still here after 8 years of saying I'm going to leave?
That something is what Tolle talks about in The Power of Now and it's what Joseph Chilton Pierce talks about in Magical Parent, Magical Child. It's also what I get glimpses of for myself in my yoga classes. The moment suspends and spreads out wide, horizontal, and beauty refuses to be overlooked. The mundane isn't an option. The snags of "don't!" and "no!" and "stop!" leave and I can let my son throw tea packets all over the floor and let him really believe they are snow. And then I sing the tidy away song, and it's absolutely effortless - he had snow, I let go, we picked up together, and the tiny heartbreak I have from watching him grow up and away from me is gone because we are bonded in that moment through the song, through my letting go, as much as when he was a tiny babe at my breast. It's an ease that feels long in my bones. I think I'm honing in on it....enter scene from last night.....
my husband and I went out on a date to see Charlie Hunter, jazz/blues/funk guitarist-bassist extraordinaire, and he really had that *now* thing going on. And I found myself wondering, again, how could I take all these messages and synthesize them into a way of being a better parent? How can I provide the platform for Rohnan to have Charlie Hunter juju inspiring his world?
Music would be a good place to start. There are a lot of good - and expensive - baby music classes out there that I could take him to, and when I'm making more money at being a mother, maybe I will. But for now, when his toddler ways have me just about to snap, I bust out the old Bjork albums, the Stevie Wonder, heck - the Raffi, and just start dancing. Soon, he's up in my arms and we are just laughing away all of my NOs and learning about rhythm on some benthic zone of our oceanic souls. His name means "little seal," after all, and we ride.