72 years, EveryNow is visible! Share peace, love, abiding joy
Author: Peter Pilley
Once it's visible, EveryNow simply must be shared. Peace, love, abiding joy. It can be yours. EveryNow.
Much of who and what this writer is I share in my various blog posts on my slowly growing EveryNow on the WordPress website.
~Love is present E v e r yN o w
The inside is the outside. The outside is the inside. In darkest night, nothing changes from the inside to the outside.
The sun rises over me.
In the light I see the outside as identical to the inside. Glory, huge hugging glory, expands and I know the inside is bigger than the outside
…..÷…..
I have been shaken to my depths since the war began in Ukraine. I have been trying to rebalance, to rediscover my equanimity. Why do I feel the pain so of these sufferers? Where is safety now? What is lit now on my path, where I used to need nothing to light my way?
It is hard work this cleaning of the heart’s wounds. It is good to light one by one the guttering candles on my way, my patient way to remember. My heart waits for me in the Middle Way. I know exactly where to look
I packed a few pine tree wood discs, sandpapered for this trip, along with my lenses.
I choose a quiet spot to set up ‘shop’ on Ipanema beach. I seat myself on my folding camp stool on the sand with my back turned three-quarters to the Sun. Polished wood in my left hand, a smallish lens in my right.
Now I have arrived. I’m in shorts, peaked cap on my head. I’m wearing glasses that protect me from 85 per cent of sunlight and from all harmful rays.
I am here at one of the most famous beauty spots on the planet. After the relative greyness of Northern Europe, I should be hyper aware of the privilege of being on Ipanema Beach. Normally my senses would be opened and scanning. I’d be drinking, seeing, hearing and loving these moments in paradise on earth.
As always, the meditative buzz of Solar Pyrography welcomes me. Soon my breathing slows, my mind empties, and what I am doing takes all of my focus. Smoke and occasionally sweet resin-scented flames rise from my wood disc, as if from a sacrificial offering.
When people see me, they nudge each other, pause and say, “Look what that man’s doing!” It’s easy to leave them on the edge of my vision.
The kids are not so shy. They barge in close. Thankfully they accept me with my monosyllabic noises. Some notice their shadows block my work. My lens moves on. Who will go home and try for themselves this trick of fire with a lens and sunlight? I am always amazed that Solar Burning is such an unknown activity in hot countries.
The Rio sun hurts. I’m in a race to finish my commission before the thirst and the pain drive me away. I’m not sunning myself, swimming, surfing, strolling along admiring the sea, the surf or the mountains. I am not drinking Brahma beer or ice-cold fresh juice from coconut stalls.
I am here, but I am not here! I am in an altogether other place.
It is as heavenly as this fabulous Brazilian holiday destination. This heavenly place is entirely contained inside of me by the precisely controlled actions of my body as I focus Sun energy through a glass onto pine wood
The engaged couple’s initials, B and D, woven into a heart made of hearts above the Lover’s Knot, looks ready to me. I hope they like it back home in Dorset.
A portal to life’s glory opened and engulfed me in 2013. I journaled to bring order into the unfolding inexplicable goodness. At first I lacked even the words in English.
My intense daily journaling and my high intensity search for the meaning of this new condition of heightened awareness morphed into this blog: http://www.everynow.blog
In my EveryNow blog, I write everyday stories of love, compassion and praise for the glories of living from the heart.
During the five or six decades of my life prior to 2013, I had contented myself with “Living to Love”, which is pretty, beautiful even, but superficial.
As my heart awakes from a long slumber in hiding, it greets me, and here is where “Loving to Live” begins!
Today I am at peace and at ease with my experience of being alive in this completeness of sentience, though it still feels as surprising and as brand new as it did at its inception.
Much of what I have become aware of as I negotiate these orchards of newness, is well described in the book I recently discovered, much to my surprise, by Raymond Carl Sigrist called “In love with everything – Apophatic Mysticism”. It’s published by Infinity.com
The most effective way to write about the constantly exploding sensations of this post-traumatic Heavenly Bliss event is to connect to its source — the heart.
Forty or fifty years of verbal doldrums, when I neglected to hold communion with my heart, have left me, even after these last nine years, in a place where I have to learn to speak from and to my heart in baby steps.
I have to learn how to speak the language of heart. This will take up all my remaining years. It is the sweetest of all possible challenges!
These massive immobile megaliths are stuck in mud, aloofly impervious to the floating breeze.
Stones, weather worn stones, high and broad, sit. They are noble solid refuges favoured by lichen.
Blessed in circular disposition with the blood and the sweat of ancestors all without age or name, the stones by size and by circle attract to themselves involuntary interpreters.
The great stones one by one call in to themselves the visiting poet, the enlightened woman or man.
Today’s people, acolytes in all but title, journey here, guided by heart-wonder, turn shining eyes on the softly present rocky surfaces.
Obedient to the allure of the Circle of Stones, the people who have eyes to see they stand close, they face the impermeable sacred verticals.
Today’s descendant ascendant people, new of flesh, bear the swarm mind imprint of the priests of old. This is why we are with the circles. This is what is embraced by ancient rock.
A hard touchable magic spell as simple as a smile breathed, releases bonds of solidity.
The long dead keepers of the astrogeometric arts pass to us their passion inside of the secret, solid and holy lightlessness.
(All that we can remember, we to whom these glorious revelations are granted, after we come away so very changed, is that we always forget,
A friend said to me… “Only by letting go of your past self can you take yourself to unimagined places.”
I cannot let go of my entire self with all of my past thoughts, words and deeds, when I hurt so much from their heavy weight on my back.
There’s much more to the action of letting go than an effort of will.
Massive changes can take place when my heart reveals itself and I take notice of its childlike purity, and I act to navigate the grand tides of new understanding my own heart offers to me.
These changes present my mind with a view of my original innocence. They begin when I listen to the positive appreciative comments from my family and friends, and I make the effort to believe what I hear.
What have I done up till now to prevent myself from believing in my goodness? And why do I turn a deaf ear to compliments and a blind eye to the anxiety in my face in the mirror which asks only to be loved?
There are answers to be found by examination of the causes of fear that I cling to. Among other places, answers in past trauma revisited, and in timid acceptance of outside pressures from social conditioning.
What naturally follows little by little is my understanding of my entirely needless attachment to my fear and self-loathing that spring from shame and my guilt about former deeds, words and thoughts engaged in out of ignorance of my true value to myself and others.
I begin to make closures for years of misdirected and wasted effort to merely content myself with survival, by forgiveness through self love and self validation.
I forgive my younger self for what I did out of ignorance fuelled by self doubt while wading along underlying streams of fear.
In this new condition of redemption for my past behaviours I can be freed of past guilt and shame, forgive, love, and let go of my past self and take myself to previously unimagined places illuminated by the peace and love from which all beings arise and to which we are all walking each other home 💫
Discrete entities, ideas, constructs are never separate, they are part of all other such ‘manifestations’.
Seeming to be singular at first, all things display a self-similarity on a simple level. They are included in the same ‘set’ of inclusivity in their totality.
More than that, all things are subtly interleaved, because all causes affect. That which is affected [by the existence of another] cannot have its origin traced, because its antecedents go back to the ‘beginning of time’ itself.
The futility of trying to ‘know’ what a singular thing ‘is’ directs me, like a prisoner is directed towards freedom, to salute the unending riches in not knowing.
The tiny wisdom of accepting not knowing is bigger than a mountain of pure gold.
Nothing excludes anything.
One of the certainties on which I can build my life is that my body, mind, heart and soul are included in the universe.
At times I might veer off and begin to wonder if Life is This or That.
Then I remember that neither one thing nor the other came first.
My consciousness arises from both.
In the moment I exist, I am both alive and an ineffable part of life. I am both alive and I am being lived by life.
Who cannot be brimming with excitement at the unfolding potential of discovery ?
This excitement is endless in the way of fractal endlessness. It is the acknowledgement of, and the gratitude for the enjoyment of this very endlessness which is both entirely sufficient and delightfully finite in the embodiment of its expression in me. This is one of the things which give rise to the chuckle of the enlightened.
I am as appreciative of this as it is humanly within my power. And I try to act accordingly.
Passionately therefore, I say I should act with compassion and respect, for the valid reason that my thoughts, my words and my deeds contain all the force of the flap of the beat of that proverbial butterfly wing
~ Love is present EveryNow
Thoughts arising…
… … …The appreciation of the pure and mathematical fundamental principles which underlie the way living beings assume their form and ‘operate’ is one essential bridge towards a deeper understanding of my place in this experience of being alive.
At times I might veer off and begin to wonder if Life is Math. Then I remember that neither one thing nor the other came first. My consciousness arises from both.
In the moment I exist, I am both alive and an ineffable part of life. I am both alive and I am being lived by life.
Who can retain their passionate overflood at the unfolding potential of discovery ? This excitement is endless in the way of fractal endlessness. It is the acknowledgement of, and the gratitude for the enjoyment of this very endlessness which is both entirely sufficient and delightfully finite. Is this what gives rise to the chuckle of the enlightened?
Where perfection is in play, encountered, and witnessed, it becomes a springboard.
Perfection, when noticed, becomes a jumping off point like a springboard for an immediate journey of travel. This journey takes us spontaneously both upwards, outwards and downwards, inwards.
In the presence of such qualities of perfection we can connect with the innate beauty of ourselves. I see that we who walk, talk and play are the product of aeons of natural selection and myriad cycles of survival and regeneration.
The way of the oyster allows time to pass, nacreous secretion to form, and a harmless pearl of great value to form. All living things, sentient or not, have arrived at material form through a similar, sacred, delicate process.
The Accretion of Time is the hallmark of the Gentleness of Being.
The most memorable photos, poems, paintings, sculptures, musical compositions are ones which make this unique appeal to our core original being — our sense of our own connection to the timelessness of our innate beauty.
When beauty, as seen in this seascape for example, triggers our response, it sidelines our notion of who we are and it reaches straight into what we are. This is an awareness of the Gentleness of Being fashioned naturally over periods of time too huge to comprehend.
Our human time frame may be overwhelmed when we are moved by art and real life entering our awareness, to the extent that our regular analytical faculties falter and blur out.
Back in the 1980’s I was trapped, caught between a rock and a hard place. My head began to fill with frustration, pain, anger, bitterness, even hatred.
The key to regaining peace of mind came from studying (with my soulmate) the book by Norman Vincent Peale, published in 1952, “The Power of Positive Thinking”. In these pages, I learned lessons invaluable for a more productive daily life with the strength of faith and peace to sustain me.
I acquired the techniques of conscious choice to reject negative modes of thinking and replace them with positive thoughts, and embrace these new ways with alacrity and gratitude.
I acquired the almost magical ability to abandon unproductive habits and replace them with new constructive ways of coping. I doubt even Luke Skywalker possessed such effective tools!
I understood how to create an image of my future productive and happy self, so I could stop wasting my energy on merely being anxious about my need to gear up to change.
In these ways, I quit smoking after 33 years. I retrained to change my career not once, but several times. I began to work on being more non-judgemental, which meant that I could better tolerate and accept without murmur negativity from others in my workplace.
And I welcomed relief into my life when I quit my pointless running on the hamster wheel of hatred.
From the beginning, I recognised the future and the past are devoid of meaning and reality, because all goals, mine and as well as yours, are achievable by a steady focus on the core strengths freely available in massive unending abundance that come from loving to live in the moment.
For the life-affirming gifts I carry in my heart and mind today, after I left behind those days of darkness and fear on the treadmill of addiction to sorrow and self-pity, I am humbly grateful.
May you awake to believe you dreamed you were alive and truly know you are
We all come towards awareness of the Being nature of existence from such a huge variety of diverse start points.
Yours is from turning this wood into this instrument of music. Mine is from visualising on blank paper the flow of words from an unseen spring.
The common factor is in the way we ourselves, who are each our own anthropomorphs, are willing to be transformed during the entry into us of these Awarenesses.
Awarenesses they seed in us, and we can begin to observe their inception, their progression into places in us for which we have no precise definition.
And we suffer, are broken open, melted down, and recrystallised in the gradual timeline of the birth pains of every Awareness.
And then comes the dawning of the joys.
The joys, like the risen Sun above the Arctic Circle, the joys will not set any more, as it becomes apparent that there is no boundary and no distinction between ourselves as witnesses of the Being of existence and our lives in the alive living of it.
•❀Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ❀•
May your best dreams be rooted in earth, may they network with the sky.
May you awake to believe you dreamed you were alive and truly know you are
May you live as a dream exists – full of form, light, wonder.
Every day, many times a day, I stand at the doorway about to close the door. In the room is my spouse, my child, friend, acquaintance, friend of a friend.
It is perfectly possible that this will be the last moment we will be in sight and in earshot of one another, because the life we breathe in and the life our heart beats out like a clock of blood is fragile beyond our understanding.
What words of love, what signs of friendship, what commentary of appreciation can I leave behind me as I close that door?
Every time you take your leave of your nearest, your dearest, remember!
Remember to bless the moment of parting with a token of your love
When I don’t allow myself to accept my circumstances, conflict begins.
I put it to you, I have no need to experience frustration as long as my consciencious attention is fiercely focused towards observation of the fruits of the moment, with every one of my senses awake, tuned, alert, receptive.
There is nothing specifically prescribed to concentrate on. After all, where my body is located, it is surrounded by sights, textures, sounds, scents – an unending procession of the external stimuli of Realia!
I, or you, can engage in this close focusing now and then, if we like.
However, when I choose repeatedly to take the time to plunge myself into immersion of the sensory moment, then from out of this microcosm, I may be blessed to receive radical life-enhancements with the power to permanently change the way I perceive the quality of my life.
These are the slow-maturing fruits of microcosmic inspection. The sweetness they bring is so sublime, I overflow with joy and I simply have to share!
I know from my own experience there is an uncomplicated way to release joy and open the floodgates to love and peace, when I recognise that my mental images of the past and the future are illusions.
The distractions of frustration, fear and anger live in the unreal past and the impossible future. These products of misdirected attention are irrelevant and wholly superfluous to human requirements!
What validates this leap into a blissful state, where rushes of love chase away every last residue of fear?
Well, for a start, being intensely nose-to-nose with the absence of time in the flying moment is thunderingly awesome.
Here are the pleasures of non-attachment, where I cultivate my close attention, and it returns intensity of awareness back to me without locking any part of me into what I am doing with my directed attention.
Explanations about the pleasure of being released from the past and the future is not the thing. The thing is to be thankful.
Gratitude is the right reaction. Be grateful for release into lightness of heart. Be thankful for sudden intimacy with the giant world of intuition. Be in awe of the strange new ability to read hearts.
Flow in the moment helps self realisation.
In the moment when a fragment of birdsong triggers my smile, it triggers also my self love. The union of self with self is union with the whole of existence. What other respectful ways of being glad are there than the gladness of humility, awe and gratitude?
Boredom stems from ignorance of, or more kindly put, from a lack of attention to the expressions of bliss in material form continually manifest at my fingers’ reach, before my very eyes and all around me.
If I am travelling at night, I might suffer from the delusion that darkness contains nothing of worth, and so I do whatever I can to accelerate my removal from an experience I tell myself I don’t like.
What I am failing to do is look up and see the briliance of stars. I am failing to halt my footfall to listen to the awe of silence. I am failing to bring to mind the stories of those lives who dwell in the nocturnal.
Boredom is a cloak whose unwelcome weight, when its onset is detected, stimulates a search for what my senses can detect that fill me with wonder, awe and the very delicious delights of discovery.
Durdle Door? You can keep your Durdle. This insignificant Dorset door has all the excitement without the fame.
Three or four times a year, I like to travel the short distance from my home and come alone to stare at one side of the green door.
This was an entry to a pastoral past. They who opened and closed this door are crystal dust. The trodden green crush of them is bedded in the pigment which flakes with every season’s turn.
Behind this green un-Durdle Door is nothing. Perhaps scratched up parts of dry mouse nest. Maybe remnants of Red Robin and his song.
This is my side of the green door. It is a standing ovation to my blasted green age
The war the Brits call “Falklands”, and the Latin Americans call “Malvinas”, was going at full throttle.
Every street newsstand throughout Brazil and beyond attracted its own little crowd of free newspaper headline readers.
The day before flying from Heathrow, I had watched on the telly enormous crowds of flag-waving families and well-wishers giving the British troop ship HMS Invincible a hearty send-off at Portsmouth.
Here I was now in a row of three seats on an internal flight from Manaus, on the Amazon, to Rio. My wife sat in the middle seat. The middle-aged man by the window struck up a conversation with me.
As is usual in Brazil, after finding that I was not an American, this gentleman, who was a third generation German Brazilian, opened up to me.
He praised the Iron Lady for her defence of British territory. Like many people I got into conversation with in Europe as well, he also mentioned Winston Churchill.
I had had to cut short our trip, because I’d caught a respiratory infection in the jungle, and it was wiser to recover where we could get help at home.
Meanwhile, because powerful remedies like antibiotics were available over the counter at the time, I had taken a couple of horse pills on the recommendation of a pharmacist the day before I boarded this flight.
We finished our in-flight meal deep in conversation. I thought it kind and considerate of my wife that she exchanged seats with me so we could carry on our discussion about the War. It never occurred to me she saw the aisle seat as a safe escape route!
I explained to this man I had met by chance that human geographic designations of territory are arbitrary, artificial and are established for economic gain and domination.
I tried to show him how the point of view of Earth from low orbit confirms this.
I suggested, furthermore, he consider how history shows us blood has been shed in conflicts between these hypothetical entities we call nations.
By the time I got to chatting about how modern industrialised slaughter has spilled more blood than ever before, the conversation had taken a louder, adversarial turn.
My new friend took exception to my extreme and culpable lack of loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, my fellow citizens and the Good Lord.
The cabin crew had by then cleared away all the in-flight meals except ours. My wife noticed that the more heated our informal conversation became, the greater the distance the air crew put between us and them.
I am the meekest and mildest of men, more mouse than man under normal conditions. But the horse pills that had cleared my chest, had installed a pacing tiger where my inner mouse used to dibble.
We overflew the Amazon and disembarked to transit at Brazilia Airport. The gentleman claimed his bags to proceed to the exit.
The last thing I remember was my wife physically restraining me from lunging after the man as he shunted his luggage trolley, with its irritatingly creaky wheel, through the Nothing To Declare gate.
Back in Blighty, it is time for the ten year census survey in Great Littleton. After this close call in time of war, I chose to write HUMAN in the box for Nationality.
🕊️ The unregarded power between rejection and acceptance ❌
When I accept a friend’s smile, I am all at once with my friend. I cannot recall anything of the moment prior to the infusion into my being of the smile.
I so am overtaken by the oscillating wave of friendship immediately upon recognition of the smile, that there is no need to analyse or rationalise the small deep joy of this human connection. It is just joy.
In fact, I never do stand aside to look at this process. And I may not be able to, because it is a trigger at a primitive level of our gregarious collective human nature.
And yet something does exist between the seeing and the surrender to the seen.
It may only be the smallest glimpse of something. And it shines clear and pure and true.
The quality of the purity and human truth present in a transaction of simple friendship is of the same order as is striven for throughout human history and which is sung and celebrated and held in the greatest esteem by thinkers and artists, sages and leaders, from the furthest reaches of recorded time.
If I do understand any of it at all, I feel it is a reflection of primal power of the life force itself that I have witnessed in the smile shared between my friend and I.
E.E.Cummings, in this poem, makes contact with this primal power with the delicacy, as it feels to me, of the wingbeats of some vaporous cosmic butterfly …
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
The View at 72+ 