Dearest Friend

Dearest Friend
It’s the choice now as it always was and always will be. Choose between fear and love.

This choice works in the easy way we control a car indicator and see it flicking on and off at our command.

Focus on this mental image because it’s worth the effort. It works.

I made this choice to choose love. At first it would have been an unconscious choice from my near death during my birth.

I was fortunate in my toddler years to have recurring flashbacks of my birth trauma.

Much later in life, I have begun to understand how my birth trauma gave me a conscious attachment to the positive aspects of life.

I share the life-view of people who have come close to death and whose outlook is changed from then on, and changed for good.

I believe my traumatic birth put me in touch with the primal urge for self-preservation.

Even before I had bonded with my Mother, her touch, her milk, my blind struggle to stay alive in life as I was born formed in me receptors to the primitive power of what people call the life force.

This is what Dylan Thomas described in his poem,
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer.”

I have had a handful of epiphany experiences, some in my twenties some within these last five years.

These extreme events brought home to me that I have control over my choices – not simply to live – but to actively seek out, hold on to and clasp every positive event and experience which subsumes my observed self, overtakes and illuminates it from my inside.

In common with many people, I lived through long periods when hope and faith made their complete absence felt in ways that left me feeling imprisoned and only partially alive.

My view in hindsight shows me how my birth was a struggle not to die. And the consequence is that, even in my darkest days, I realise I have been tuned to go towards all those relishable, cherishable, and highly valued life-affirmations.

So now I take care to make choices so that I am in a position in my moment-to-moment living to be alert and aware and accepting of all the light outside that has the potential to turn into light inside me.

I’m 72. Or as one Facebook friend has put it, more than twenty-six thousand days into life.

Consider the stark divergence between what your heart is telling you it is and what it wants for you, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the range of challenges, hardships, trials, burdens, shame, grief, semi-dead guilt, unhealed wounds, and yet more awfulness that appear crisp and clear, rising unbidden in full colour 3-D in the great shop window of your mind.

Consider the divergence from these two realities.
There is the reality of the heart’s willing private, intimate conversation of a love so tender it literally flows on out of sight.

And there is the reality of the self-sabotaging, self-destructive, self-deprecating obstacles that the mind is ever ready to remind you are immediate, present, and still sore and unresolved; obstacles which the mind – ever pointlessly malicious – invites you to pick up, full of stabbing poison.

Of these two realities, one can always make itself available, and it comes complete with replayed real life unbearable experiences, haunting unwanted personages, dialogues, scenery and all the trappings of the stage of horrors.

Of these two realities, one is utterly impossible to touch, see, smell, hear or feel. It is in consequence hard to hold in view… But it is possible to choose to sense it at will and it is possible to fully enter into a deep and fulfilling conversation with it at the drop of a hat, whether you are sick or healthy, even in torment, trial or tribulation.

Your eyes, my eyes, our habit of us all is to regard the future quite a lot. Those real time issues and challenges you must face. You do have to face them. Often they are completely inescapable and if we repeatedly junk the opportunity such challenges present, we diminish ourselves repeatedly.

In just such a piecemeal way we can junk our entire lives, future, and past, till nothing in the present has value, nothing seems to matter, except (tragically) the absence or termination of not-caring.

But isn’t it a strange and true fact that a sane mind just cannot openly will itself to deny its present?

The present is the point of balance, the spring where the seed of life, love, and of all that is pure, worthy and regenerating actually resides.

It is the fact of the overarching sheer bigness of the present that makes both the unignitable past and the vapours of the future redeemable.

So try to embrace the challenges with love, not fear. The future is for making choices in. This human nest of love, where like meets like, is key. It is “where it’s at”.

The focus is on this instant, and as powerfully as possible. Concentrate in the same way you unleash your own colours and patterns on your creative tides, big or little.

The achievement of a state of grace is normally via the hardest, twistiest, longest of roads.

It is useful to visualise yourself as a small person on these paths, holding hands with your heart, expecting, not wishing or longing, for the beauty to show itself in the next turn of the way.

There is one special knack to use to help jam the illusory gates to your prison open. Using it will sooner or later dissolve the gates and all barriers, like mist under the summer Sun at dawn.

It is to hold hands with your heart.

Let go. Allow yourself to see and be joyfully recognised by the fantastically beautiful person you are: your heart knows this.

If you smile at and hold hands with the heart of yours, you will hear it tell you exquisite, feverish love stories – all about you!

All your heart ever wants is to tell you it loves you.
You are dearly loved EveryNow.

Choose love. In thought word and deed choose to actively deploy and harness the entire dictionary, orchestration and spectrum of love.

I have been quoting this by Julian of Norwich inwardly for four decades, and it is one of my Fixed Stars:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well” … ❤️