It is an odd fact, and it still doesn’t ‘reconcile’ with me, that all of the newness which arrived with my awakening opening heart in 2013, the “Year of my Life”, is still arriving unfiltered and continuing new.
Nothing seems to tarnish my outlook. No grey rime of familiarity impairs my vision of those daily events and witnessed insplashings of beauty that impact my five senses.
All is amazing, all is unique. It’s all new, and so I share.
I must share, I can’t help but share. The child on the bus who points out of the window, and says “Oh look at that!” is also helpless, unable to resist making a show, and is propelled into sharing the pleasures of surprise, when surprise overflows.
A colour, shape, pattern (I love patterns), or something I see or hear is absorbed by my senses. It is processed by my brain and my inbuilt precision engineered cogs rev up and so my heart revs up also.
When my Father referred to me at his side as his “kiddie”, I felt diminished, dismissed as less than significant. This happened even when I was a young teenager. He meant nothing by it, but how it made me fume!
Today, sixty years older, I notice I see and hear with the ears and eyes of a kiddie. For this grace of holding hands with the natural world I am wide-eyed with gratitude.
It is a way of envisioning endlessness which never even had a beginning. What happened long ago, is that I had closed my eyes to it and I had placed my obedient heart in deep freeze.
Then, at the beginning of The Year of my Life, in 2013, my hibernating heart was reached, touched directly by the pure love of others.
My excavated heart lay blinking up at me, revealed like a newborn baby, with giggles in place of disbelief!
My heart had remained for so long at my still centre, that two things happened at one and the same time.
I regained the innocent vision of Thisness, the intrinsic quality of ‘what is’. And with it, I became one with the instinctual me I call myself as an indissoluble element of the material world of which the atomic me is composed.
At the onset of such a state of bliss, my human hard-wired rational abilities of processing meaning from received sensory input were bypassed, because all my energy was drawn to my heart, which was beginning all over again to return love for received love.
My heart was like a huge motionless flywheel which had received the first motive input. The extraordinary, surprising thing is that I could see and feel it turning with beautiful gravitas, making its own delicious and unique centrifugal force of love!
That experience of extreme surprise is as real to me at this moment as it was in 2013. I have the grace of Newness never-ending.
Will it ever end?
What has, for its intrinsic quality, endlessness? To many people, the beginning of a ball of string is not visible, and so the mind tells the brain the start of the string is there somewhere. By the time the brain gets this idea, it is far far too late for the person to have come into an intimate relationship with the entirety of the stringiness and ballness of the seen object.
To be able to see endlessness as a sensation sounds far-fetched. But it is not a requirement of endlessness that it be fetched!
Why bother to go fetch what is so near as to be already in me, in you, in everything everywhere, EveryNow?
Meanwhile, listen up! Be lucky! You might just hear the ball of string softly chuckle into its roundness.
EE Cummings tells it in a poem I first read, and which still holds me with its power, from when I was only seventeen –
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
The View at 72+ 