~~~ Share the love ~~~

I am bursting to tell you that an opening into an understanding has appeared to me. It has made things much less complicated. It has removed shed-loads of stress and taken away my false sense of obligation to myself and others.

I began journaling daily from my year of heart awakening in 2013. The collected curated posts began to form into my EveryNow blog on WordPress in 2018. The urge to “share the love” spurred me on and on to add more and more to EveryNow.

In November 2019, my mortality tapped me hard on my shoulder with a heart arrhythmia. My heartbeat suddenly went up to 162 and stayed there.

Whatever else might be about to happen to me, I knew I wanted to preserve and protect EveryNow as my legacy, my personal expression of my love of life. So while I waited my turn for surgery, I threw money at Facebook in order to extend and accelerate the geographic readership of my blog. 

I created my Facebook page “EveryNow”. This form of advertising broadcasting has had some effect. A few tens of thousands have seen EveryNow who would never have known about it.

My troubling medical disturbance was mercifully cured, completely eliminated, by a small, simple, short procedure in January 2020.

I saw relatively huge numbers of paid for “hits” on EveryNow, tens of thousands of them, compared to my ordinary Facebook likes in single or double digits. I am struck, in truth I am thunderstruck, by the complete absence of engagement from any of them, in Europe, the United States and the UK. Although I have had no dislikes, I received no likes and no comments.

What does this mean for comprehending the behaviour of my new audience? And what does this great indifference say to me, and tell me about my attempt to make ripples, plant seeds, create new webs of connection through the beloved child of my heart, EveryNow?

With my own online presence, I continue to see others, present like me, “Sharing the Love” . My having joined them enables me to see what I am trying to express and present more ‘in-the-round’. I can take a wider perspective, and be more objective than when I started out online.

I understand more than ever that my on-line presence, which has been virtually daily since 2013, is on the scale of one fish in a planet-wide ocean of fish. Add to those fish, all the fish in rivers and lakes, and I can easily visualise my self-image of Fish-Man-Me to the correct scale. Infinitesimally small. 

It’s gratifying that my blog shows signs that it’s just begun to reach a critical audience mass where the audience is growing without my adding new blog posts. One or two per week are seeing my blog posts. Look no hands! New followers are following from the old.

I imagined readers would report to me their reactions and new conversations might grow wings of inspiration and new communion.

In short, I reckoned that I have something of value, that I am saying something significant, and that there are people I don’t yet know who want to read more about what I am saying.

Every one of these assumptions and basic premises have no basis in fact!

My words are not set to catchy pop melodies, my ideas are not the stuff of viral jokes which spiral up the charts on fire, like Catherine wheels in the sky. 

My words are truths clad in pastel colours. They arise from identical wellsprings of humanity as the emotions of any other person.

What I report on is one presence among all the other presences. The main difference is that I happen to be broadcasting it. This is no cause for others to sit up and take notice. It is hardly a reason for others to open one eye to me. After all, as I never get tired of saying, “Love is present EveryNow”.

If my art consists in saying I am as human and as alive as you, this is sufficient for the moment in which my words and images interact with another person. Much more importantly, it shows that this is amply sufficient for me also.

Here is the fork in the road. I have two choices according to what I think I have become.

My first choice is, I could choose to try again to enlarge EveryNow’s audience by financing more Facebook advertising. It can cost as little as one pound per day, and I am able to monitor the results closely. 

By doing this, I can focus on the urgent calls of love that my heart, ears, eyes and mind shout out at every turn and step on my daily path. I can decide to completely devote my resources to give priority to the all-consuming feelings of urgency in the call to love that I find is so strong within me at all times.

One of the top attributes of this call to love is unabating newness. My emotional responses to external stimuli seem to react as if everything is continually new, everything is happening for the first time. This counterintuitive, even downright illogical, highly receptive ‘hyper’ state contributes such a lot to my desire to share the love. I do recognise it. In some form or another it’s a state of Grace. 

Gradually, step by step, since this awakened state came about in 2013, I have been prompted to acknowledge to myself the fact of my new 24/7 condition – so akin to bliss unshakeable – because of the mirroring I have received from those close to me whose integrity and honesty I respect. 

In parallel to this broadening acceptance of who, and more significantly, of what I am, my own self-compassion, my self-love has grown up to increase and become real too.

Here is an example. The point arrived some time in 2020, when I fully understand my fear of death is fear no more! 

A portal opened for me in 2013 and it has never closed. I found a vehicle to offer to other people what I believe is most unusual and precious about what is happening on the other side of that magic door. It is the EveryNow blog. That’s why the Blog seems to be the bandwagon to leap onto!

My second choice is, I can step away from that image of me as one fish among trillions. I can shy away from the urge to increase, embellish, emblazon and enlarge my shadow under the sun. I can accept the concept of my membership of the Swarm of life. I can view my life as a Pixel of Humanity.

From the moment I fully understand what it means to be a Pixel of Humanity, I fully  arrive at a place of pure acceptance, and purest peace, too! I know the joy of being simply alive, sentient and sensual, and my acceptance that this disarmingly exquisite experience of mine, of loving to live, equates to that of any other being, great or small, sentient or not.

I hardly find it necessary to differentiate between the ecstacy I feel when an empathy moment arises that lets me savour my intimate proximity to a pebble, a small stone ‘in the flesh’, never mind the delight of meeting with another loving, living being, animal or vegetable.

So what’s it to be? Here’s the thing. After I have made the all important distinction between the quality of love and the quantity of the qualities of which love is the bearer, I no longer want or need to try to grasp at the latter, because the former shows itself to me as so comprehensively sufficient.

From the moment I unreservedly accept that my voice among many voices praising and extolling love is like a summer flower in a gigantic flowering meadow, every thought, every emotion is stripped of layers of meaning and becomes quite suddenly Sufficient.

When my flower, my soul is not here any longer, when it comes to the end and it melts into the earth it rose from, it will remain as one of the myriad expressed forms of love forever

~ Love is present EveryNow