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Category: Written journal
The dance of EveryNow
Dance the EveryNow
Love is “bigger on the inside than on the outside”
This is the perpetual motion of eternal emotion
A flicker of lovelight, the faintest glimmer acknowledged, and love bubbles, fills, overtops, floods, and dances
Dance the EveryNow with love!
~Love
is present
EveryNow❤️
The quality of political leadership
So, there IS HOPE for the quality of political leadership!
http://news.trust.org/item/20191210134211-jlo58/
So many UK citizens carry on trusting their futures to decisions made by grey-suited elder males whose tastes in transport, education and health tend to be private, personal and privileged.
I ask myself what are the features of leadership in others which I am socially conditioned to admire, trust and respect?
In these times, in this society, where few people offer older citizens respect for old age, I ask myself what are the institutions, groups and individuals who instill in me recognition of admirable factors in people I meet?
I ask myself why do I respond like a programmed robot to superficially pleasing stimuli? Symmetrical, blemish-free features? Musical tone of voice? Staccato, stentorian, male voices of command and control?
Education from the earliest years onwards notably avoids equipping the population with ways to understand how to be Human, how to understand the huge extent to which our own humanity influences, drives, nourishes and sustains us.
As we pass through the mills of education, we can perfectly easily be refined and enriched by being alerted and sensitised to the needs of ourselves and our fellows in simple formal schoolroom scenarios.
It is a deplorably common experience for any shop assistant to suffer gratuitous rude, aggressive or dehumanising customer behaviour from the other side of the shop counter.
Early years education by role-play could give insights into the meaning of added-value to basic social interactions.
For an example in the retail world, we can learn how our understanding of our lack of awareness of the emotional and physical needs of the Other person in any given social interaction can be received as “damage” or as “gift”.
We can learn how those on whose services we rely continuously for our comfort and safety are deserving of our gratitude.
On the other side of this, we can learn to understand what happens when we indulge in violence of thought, words or actions.
We can learn how inappropriate, unconstructive and even damaging are our unfettered, uncomprehending, un-selfaware expressions of our gut reactions.
We can learn how to enhance our interpersonal skills with all service providers, and then in ever-widening circles of humanity, by substitution of frosty, impersonal, fear-based contact-avoidance with direct eye-contact, and the adoption of some of the very same positive customer-service skills taught, so late in their life-cycles, to adult recruits into the labour force.
What a world!
Office life, working life, political life transformed by ownership of self.
Our lives no longer characterised to the point of sickness of spirit by abrogation of self-respect in favour of those into whose hands we submit our fate grudgingly and with a stifled heart.
🔶An amulet of words against Loneliness 🟥
* An amulet of words against Loneliness *
Is it the fleeting face of loneliness I see between the laughter and the smiles?
Yes, let it have its day in the sun.
Plenty of time, oh, there’ll be time enough I say, one day to pine for the weeks spent without a hand to hold, after your life has reached an apotheosis and you have so many hands within arm’s reach of your love-filled heart.
There is no book nor physic to spirit away loneliness.
In an inevitable plurality of beings, loneliness is a fact of human arithmetic. It sleeps at the footstool like a stone lion with its eyes open!
Two things our bodies are not naturally made to tolerate.
One is to be afflicted by violence. While the other is to be afflicted by loneliness.
Steer your course oh so safely, dear Shining Soul, between this Scylla and that Charybdis.
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” says Julian of Norwich.
There are large helpings of power and strength in those words! You have sole responsibility to make them so.
You will go out tomorrow into the noisy crowds. And with you, you will carry an enormous cathedral-like and most noble silence.
And you will smile, because your silence is ‘grand’, and you know it is as full of hospitable welcome, as the urging daydreams of your distant distant descendents.
~ Love is present EveryNow
🧱To my Friend who is in pain and perplexity🏖️
💠 To my Friend who is in pain and perplexity🔹
I truly wish my words may fill up your heart with love, dear Friend.
I remind you, you have set out courageous and have begun to confront dark barriers which old traumas and sorrows have solidified into blocks on your path.
Some of these horrid monoliths you have grown accustomed to carrying about with you wherever you go, wherever you are.
This is hard work, exhausting and lonely. There is no relief. The sad thing is, in the end, your beautiful lovable self can curl up and shrink out of sight.
And now I remind you that I still believe in Epiphany.
Being drenched by a spontaneous experience of this magnitude can take a person into a state of raised consciousness, regardless of unresolved internal obstacles.
Here is a place, a state of vibrant new awareness, where there is a continuous, powerful, conscious intuitive connection between oneself and the origin of all life.
This is a sudden inrush into the heart of life force – peace and love – from which all life springs and to which all life returns.
The heart floods with love.
Very quickly the lovelight shows up the years, months and days lived in the shade.
Here is the source of a waterfall of Healing.
I liken this potential to enter into transformative awakening, this state of grace by an epiphany, to an arrival at a Portal, as depicted so graphically in ‘Stargate’, the sci-fi series.
However, there is a price to pay. No one steps through such a Portal casually. It takes courage and determination, sometimes born out of desperation and repeated suffering, to embark on such a rite of passage.
A person who has acknowledged and begun a journey of self-discovery, this person is unavoidably on course to rediscover the lovable, as well as the loving self.
The loving self I say, because you know you love and you have loved, and you can love. Giving such as this comes rather naturally.
Can you be loved so willingly in these familiar ways by your own self? In a nutshell, can you love yourself?
Can you “be love” ?
Some call the opening of a significant life journey a falling in love again with the self.
“Again” because the original self “is” love. The early human baby, to whom the future has no meaning, is all about present immediacy.
This new being inhabits the space, the playground of love.
Here in this primal arena is also hunger, thirst, desire for security, in whatever order.
The reason (if such an abstraction has any meaning in the context of a newborn) why such primal needs excite us so much is simply that they sustain life.
This is life lived at no remove at all from the life instinct – the will to live, the will to continue to survive. This condition of mind is primitive, urgent, exciting.
And I say it is very beautiful. Indeed it is one of the openings into beauty.
Every sentient being on Earth – in the sea, on land, in the air – lives at this intense level.
Some time later, at the stage of independence, once the need is implanted as a result of whatever life circumstances, banal or dramatic, to discover some answers to Who, What, even Why I “am”, the path at your feet may become luminous and fertile with a rather mysterious sense of promise.
This feeling of being onto something exciting is present for the straightforward reason that there is a strong intuition that some kind of fulfilment is just round the corner.
The possibility of resolution becomes attainable, because you visualised it, called out to it, cried out for it.
All life is interconnected. All interconnections stem from one source. The source is terrific, powerful and overwhelmingly beautiful, and we hear this spoken by many from various directions from time imemorial.
In unity, Humanity has raised its face to this millennial truth. This is how it is.
Little wonder that having stepped out on the pilgrimage to self realisation, the ground begins to tremble, and the urge to continue is irresistible.
The stage is reached where only a hair trigger stimulus will be enough to slam the seeker into a brilliant way of seeing.
Or not!
Epiphany experiences are in rather short supply!
It may happen little by little.
A person grows quietly into a new place of understanding and acceptance, with, “So that’s it.” With a few aha’s.
It may happen quickly, like a dam burst. There is no avoiding, no postponing, no ignoring the approach of light, the flowering of the vision of life in grand abundance, and, with this release, laughter and the deep sense of joy-in-residence.
I so truly wish these blessings on you with all my soul’s strength, my dear Friend.
Love is present E v e r yN o w
The search for EveryNow
~ Love is present EveryNow ❤️
For years I questioned how I can be in total comfort with myself? How can I be happy and my spirits be in balance?
Always these questions around introspection and self-enquiry for me.
After my very young inner child had successfully built grand defences against early trauma, the sea of companionship receded from me and I was on my own fortified island.
Marooned as the “me I call myself” long after my defences had ceased to serve their purpose, I was perpetually on an elusive quest to “catch” myself engaged fully in my most completely alive and revealing moments, at peace and in bliss.
So I feel to share again in gratitude and in simple celebration the mutual recognition of light and beauty in another, and the reflection in me.
Here, in another time of writing, is my pixel of truth as a member of humanity… ” So when I try to define my life’s force in words, or dance, or music, or art, it does not resist me, neither can it escape me, because it is me.
On rare exquisite occasions, my life-force can turn towards me and light me up with a smile of a beautiful person whose gaze I meet, and I am melted clean. “
I once put this on paper…” In the intervening time since I first wrote this, I have many times over been ‘melted clean’. Every time this minor miracle happens, my heart tells me, ‘Leap for joy! Loop the loop!’ until the last remnants of grime and sludge disappear from the windscreen of my pedestrian view. “
It is when I am no longer aware of it, and have not ‘reminded myself’ to tell myself that I am happy, that the quintessence of pleasure occurs. It occurs the way a bubbling freshwater spring upwells.
And here, for many years, and indeed for my first 66 years, submission to the joy of the moment – EveryNow – remained a pretty metaphor, an intriguing glimpse of other people’s existences, but never my own.
My route to arrival (in part) at EveryNow was through my furious and repeated focus over an extended period of years on these two puzzles.
What constitutes the bliss that so utterly takes “me” over? And where am “I” at the moment I vanish and become “become” bliss?
Again… what is the experience like to completely “be” someone else? Put in other words, what is it to fully present my own self with the pure distillation of the sentience of another living sentient creature?
By engaging myself in this roller-coaster thought-ride, centrifugal force may fling me off. It is just one of the many ways to lose myself and find the world.
If I care to think on it, this is the best endeavour of all of my powers of understanding and intuition set to the task of vanishing as being me, and to entering into the sacred presence of the essential essence of another. Another man, woman, tree, even a stone!
Less is so much more that it defies description!
And it is this lack of definitive Definitions, this willingness of mine to take the courage of my own spiked curiosity, in the absence of labelling intentions, that brings me to see there are two things which have meaningful existence: Peace and Love.
Love is the child of Light and Peace.
What makes all the foregoing worthwhile and valid? These two: Peace and Love. Peace and Love are qualities which together constitute my heart, my most sacred personal space.
And I have a simple practical way to find myself whenever I am in need, feel troubled, restless or lost.
The reality for me of the existence in me of Love and Peace is not just a chunk of factual knowledge that I can refer to.
Through thick and thin, illness, despair, literal clinical madness and the mayhem of chaos, I know for sure I need only look inwards.
I only need touch into this heart of mine with a smile in order to reignite my entire panoply of reasons to be alive and to continue to live.
Instantly I am driven to raise and praise these qualities and make them known and shared far and wide.
And principally to those I love.
~ Love is present E v e r yN o w ❤️
EveryNow overflows
⭐ Beauty resounding without boundaries⭐
The day is composed of an infinity of EveryNows. Each EveryNow overflows with potential. In this picture I see only one of trillions
Hands across the planet
§ Hands across the planet §
It’s a good moment to share.
It’s been about sixty-six years. I see life as a Flow. We human beings have more in common with the Swarm of life, than with our individual goings and comings.
Even when outstanding individuals express monumental truths, the light emitted by them is momentary, because their expressions relate to core pillars of existence, and these are what everyone has in common with everything.
If one person sees a fragment of universal brilliance, and urgently shares it, it is not the person, but the starkly appearing light which grabs our attention.
If an artist shines a light on something, that thing is not spotlit, it is some extra thing of everything that is seen illuminated.
I read with fascination and admiration about journeys of awakening on Facebook, and I love to speak about matters of the heart with close friends.
I see more than ever theirs matches my own journey of exploration of ideas about the progress of the soul.
In particular, and most recently, the fundamental predominance of the Swarm, the Collective Spirit or Soul of humanity shows up.
Like the view of the rising of the Sun or Moon, when I as individual progress towards clear unobstructed vision of my place in the Cosmos, I see reflections and similarities in so many other eyes and minds and hearts all along the generations.
My sense is, when discovering threads of thought in common, I tread on shared steps on paths in common.
My sense is of a warm “welcome home” feeling that those puzzles I have independently struggled to understand are valid subjects to struggle with.
I may have passed decades questing for significance and meaningful truths together with myself, separate from the madding crowd, like a hermit, or a Pole Percher, because isolation had been mine for the first 66 years.
My vindication today is I realise that I climbed the mountain perhaps out of ignorance by the long hard route, yet I breathe in the same panoramic views at the summit, as those who were led there by the hand, or even those who rode there easy on cushioned palanquins!
I am a journeyman of old. These apprentices were shown the time-honoured methods, they picked up on the rules of thumb, they gained in skill at a patient pace measured in long Moon cycles.
After such deep cultivation of modus operandi, constructed by past generations in patient travail, and observed with reverential respect by these artisans and fertilised in the genererous company of craftspeople, their time became precious knowledge.
These workers produced their own examples of their crafts using their own dexterity, deftness, lightness of touch. Their learned and time-perfected skills also became a part of their way of life.
They neither boasted nor hid their extensive skills. They were inseparable from who they were. They got on with the job.
What’s my job?
I want to help show others how love, in its blessed power and tenderly disposed majesty, waits with all the patience of the arching sky, to be softly welcomed in.
I want to help show that this startling, monumental and terribly welcome love, when it becomes visible through the thinnest of thin veils, is always ready to hold hands with you in your heart of hearts.
I live to see the sunrise-smile moment of recognition when this love’s first greeting names itself and reveals itself as resident Peace at the core essence of you and of each one of us.
That epiphany moment when you just know darkness will never, can never return!
Blindly seek no stones where only jewels of love pertain. Intense love, though blind, removes every vestige of shade, doubt, fear.
And everywhere there is love.
The best to you on this day’s end, your day’s beginning, whoever, wherever you are on the planet
✨
Love is present E v e r yN o w
Your restless heart
Your restless heart is your guide and your sentient compassion is the mover.
Only rebefriend your heart, and let your heart lead.
Not very long ago, I used to be eternally questing and questioning, investing the plain truth of the absolute with additional comprehensions and comparisons. I characterise this superficial dance of mine as ‘Living to love’.
I disagree with the popular saying, “Everything happens for a reason”. I see a satisfying completeness, a sighing release of tension, in, “Everything happens.”
Where Everything Happens, the mind is led away from knock, knock, knocking on closed doors. The heart awakes and is free to see No-Door, and goes right on through with the elegant grace of a non-chalant swan.
The more acceptance of the perfection of all that exists replaces desire for answers to existence, the more serenity, peaceful mind, quietude of subtle joys begin to take centre ground and are ready become endless fountains of nourishment and healing. As It Was in the Beginning, etc etc etc.
It took me most of the self-aware years of my life to begin to arrive here. I have ceased to seek new questions. I open the eyes of my eyes to the answers which precede all questions. Answers outnumber questions pretty much to extinguishment!
The ingredients of my understanding were always present. Only I would so enjoy observing them tumbling around! At this moment my washing machine is gurgling contentedly and doing exactly that!
~ Love is present E v e r yN o w
A friend’s tears
§ On hearing of a friend’s tears §
There never is any preparation for the fact of death. When the shock of it affects our loved ones, family, friends, friends of friends or acquaintances, or those with whose names and influences we have grown up, death immediately shakes us to our very molecules.
In a strange way, because death is so extreme, so absolute, death can be trusted. This is a certainty to be grateful for.
Death never hides. It never pretends or is ambiguous. It is subject to no interpretation or comprehension other than by reference to itself alone.
That is what sets the fact of death apart from regular human business. There are no arguments, no halfway compromises. There is nothing else to do but to meet the fact of death with compassion and acceptance.
The only preparation we can offer to ourselves is to explore our innate compassion, to undertake the lengthy process of cultivation of self-love, leading to the humility of Acceptance.
Long years of making a friend of Acceptance may lessen the chaos of the shock when death visits. We can bring to our awareness over time what our natural compassionate impulses mean to us, and we can examine with care and attentiveness the sources, the origins of compassion.
It may seem of practical help to reflect on how the origins of compassion derive both their beginning and ending in death. There is a continuous cyclic flow of energy conservation, whose non-competitive, symbiotic motive forces span the axes of death and living compassion.
Respect is due in equal measure to death’s inevitability and to our ability to deepen our acceptance of death with compassion
~ Love is present E v e r yN o w
The new normal
🔅 THE NEW NORMAL 🔅
What do I have to do to raise my happiness and attract more of it in my life?
I need do nothing new. I need to study nothing new.
When love is the lead emotion and passion has taken the steering wheel, words come into my mind the way sunshine pours down after grey rainclouds have blown away.
When in love, love and the ideas and words for love saturate my mind.
Words! The same words that we all hear in the lyrics of every single love song, classical or popular.
I don’t need to take poetry classes to find the words of love songs and love letters. The words of love they find me. My head is already full of love lyrics the way a greening meadow in March is full of jumping lambs.
What amazingly small amounts of effort does it take to bring to mind the places, events, sounds, sights, foods, scents, and the images of people who made me smile and gave me delight!
My time when goodness animates me is my most precious time.
Every moment of pleasantness, contentment, delight or even ecstacy with which I consciously fully flood my mind and heart can become a permanent star in my mental heaven.
Good times that fill up my attention, whether fleeting half-moments or long term joys, are as critically valuable to me as the droplets of nectar brought back by the honey-bee are crucial to the survival of the hive.
I know I have a mind full of Fixed Stars which will be there to guide me whenever I need them to fill my darker moments with light!
What a wealth of strength and support I can access – right there inside of me for the asking – when I go to the carefully stacked shelves in my storehouse of positive thoughts and recollections.
If I practice surrendering deep into my many tiny moments of everyday humdrum bliss, pretty soon it becomes entirely unnecessary to spend my time entertaining thoughts that are boring, miserable, painful, frustrating, distressing, ugly, fearful, or hate-filled.
When I prefer to shun bitter tastes, sights that sicken, random aggression, or when I step back from the edge of a drop, I am not alone, I am sharing my humanity with my self-preservation. But I go a step further. I extend natural self-protection, and boldly I reach deep into the heart of love.
The redirection of my full attention to anything at all that is positive is not just the simplest of methods to help me lead a life of grateful content. The practise of intense appreciation of the details of pleasure brings a steady acceleration of goodness into my daily reality.
Appreciation leads my hand to gratitude. And that impulse, considerately put into practice, leads to the equal balanced reaction – service.
I find myself rehearsing and repeating the words which describe thoughts of positive things.
I catch myself speaking with passion to my friends, and I choose all of the areas of meaning reserved for a lover, except for those specific key words.
I so enjoy letting my mind pick out with deliberate care vocabulary from the Lexicon of Positive and the Encyclopaedia of Love.
After all, it is supremely logical to want the best for the other person, and if love is at the root of my inspiration of the moment, my reason for engaging must be to show how love distills away all contradiction and quells the fears that inflame pain.
It is perfectly normal to smile under these influences. As my Mother used to tell me, to help me counter my adolescent tendency to dwell on my morose thoughts with a glum face, “Smile and the world smiles with you”.
Love! It’s the new normal
“To begin the journey, first it is necessary to arrive”
I wrote the poem ‘Journey’, just as my heart was beginning to open in 2013.
The lifelong search for meaning was both beginning and ending.
I have been knocking at an open door. I have been straining to hear echoes from my voice. I have woken up to drag my feet through the unexplained, inexplicable days with my eyes closed.
When an animal like a dog or a bird spots an object of interest, it will race to it. It takes no time out for risk assessment. It consults no preflight checklist, it undertakes no critical path analysis of its intention, and it generally measures its actions against its peer group behaviour not at all.
When “I”, Peter the Pilley, lean into “I” the animal, I have no use for the old and much-thumbed ‘Wiki of What-Ifs’. I can leave it to sit on the shelf in the library of my mind.
The naked flame has no label. The naked flame hurts. That’s all there is to it from my perspective.
My perspective!
Picture a tree in a woodland setting. Here is the label neatly printed, affixed to the trunk. It confirms beyond all doubt this entity’s identity, because it is written: TREE.
Turn away and look elsewhere. Millions of labels are attached to millions of objects, most with subtext and supplementary information.
The naked flame needs its label. Either I acquire it by burning myself, or it is given to me by admonition.
The World of Labels is acquired from our human beginnings. It is a useful and often necessary complement to my navigation. Labels can disappear entirely under the influence of a hallucinogen. Labels will reappear later to be where I am, only to hang around one step in front of me — as persistent and ingratiating self-appointed guides — ready with their irrefutables… “this is this” and “that is that”.
Desperation, frustration and plain old misery can arise if the world of labels is accepted unquestioned. Labels can cage the heart and trap the soul. I am talking about barriers tagged “What if” and “I can’t” and again “not now, some other time”.
It is in the years since the Year of my Life, 2013, that I have seen through the heaviness of damp woollen shrouds, all richly hung with labels. Gradually, as I see mirrored everywhere the living-beingness of things, I have experienced over and over the thrill of recognition.
I stop. I see here the waving antennæ of a single lacewing at rest. What is it? What is it sensing? What does it search for, sifting the sightless drifts of air for what signal? I stop and ask Lacewing.
I stop at a stone on the footpath. It is different, maybe in shape or colour. I stop and ask Stone where did you acquire your shape? What processes and over how long originated your stoniness?
There is a curious, unmistakable recognition of excitement aroused by pausing to enquire In this simple way, where no parent, schoolteacher, employer has shown, instructed or directed before.
There is an urgency in the attraction of this feeling. It is related to, but not exclusive of, the search for an ultimate meaning.
I wanted to repeat the thrill of seeing both myself and the lacewing’s mind disappear under the cross-examination of reading the Mirror of Thisness.
Gradually, over a long period of time, I made my choice. I chose to ask, to see if I can see the unseen in everything I walk past. The more I stop to examine the macrocosm in the microcosm of my immediate surroundings, the more I began to melt away as “I” observer.
The intensity of what is mirrored to me from the life-energies which surround me everywhere, of which in truth I myself am composed, is perfectly able (if I allow it) to blow me away.
Blown away like the seeds on a dandelion. Like the mist over a morning pond. Like drunk with the most intoxicating liquor ever brewed by the ancients of days, in millenia past!
I went for a walk in Roydon’s Wood, near Brockenhurst in the New Forest, one spring not long ago. The months of build-up of house moving stresses demanded release in some forest bathing.
I started going on methodical, mostly solo, backpack rambles in 1978. Till now, I must have covered many thousands of miles, almost all in the south of England.
This woodland walk was not like the others. It felt like it was my very first. The woods and the Big Green of the scenery were not specially different. I was. The intensity of the recognition of pleasure at finding myself at last alone among so many mature trees on a windless Spring day was so surprising that my identity as a social creature had shrunk away. I had become little more than a sensitive receiver and I was filled up with awe and joy.
As I walked, very slowly indeed, “I” experienced the magic of Not Being Here in all its wonder and beauty. I knew what was happening. My self-referential identity had dwindled to unimportant. I willingly gave myself up to the awe of the moment. I had no need at all to reach out and label.
There are many who need little, even no preparation, and who “get it”, this discipline of enquiry into Thisness.
For me, it has been decades of stumbling, falling down, failing, being rescued, not recognising received love, ferociously hating, self-sabotage, asleep-waking, when all I needed was simply to stop and open the eyes of my eyes. I guess years of meticulous study and self-disciplined enquiry could have brought about the reunion of my heart within my identity, but I always rebelled against training.
As it turns out, a time came at the start of 2013, when other people allowed their hearts to share their visibility with my own.
This happened at a time when my courage to understand matched my curiosity discover. The result was an emotional earthquake, an explosive event which removed the decades old protective layers I had placed around my heart.
Since that moment, I have been working to revere and celebrate the continuing discoveries. My EveryNow blog is one way to record these.
My heart is an opening heart. It is no different to your heart. No different to the heart of a stone on the footpath!
Only connect! In an inevitable plurality of beings, I allow myself to melt into Beingness. As often as possible, I melt away the walls of the mind. Let the sighing relief of simply being alive fully take over from the exacting exigencies of imposed imperatives.
The entirety of the potential of the universe is yours and mine, and it only asks to be asked for!
~ Love is present E v e r yN o w
The Waves of the Generations – Your Place in Infinity
🌾 Your place in Infinity 🥀
See your breath as clouds of starlight
It is time to open the eyes of your eyes
Listen to Your Place in Infinity – a guided meditation.wav by peterodactyl on #SoundCloud
Largesse of life abounding
The revolving stage removes the Sun.
Distilled evaporations of daylight follow gaily, respectfully behind, while courtly silks and rich pastel satins flow in procession over the horizon
The stage revolves and,
motionless,
we are freely carried with it
on the curvature’s largesse
Happy are the fortunate few,
for their gaze is drawn upward toward darkness!
They receive the sudden grandiose gift of fecund Moon
Moon is sated by the Sun’s departed retinue of salmon flashes, great golds, carmine bloods, dusky pink and honey drooled yellows!
Largesse of life abounding to all who live and breathe
The time is come to seek fresh borning.
To Moon, I bow
To Moon, I kneel
While all around the freshening silences intertwine
Day and night come and go
See the sense of season
Sleep naked of reason
Old earth is new earth in the dark seed’s eye
~ and Love is present EveryNow
🟢beauty detonating🟣
🟢beauty detonating🟣
A blade of grass has no looking-glass. It is not green by reason of it absorbing all colours but green.
A grassblade is an abstraction of beauty in a pure material form. It is so and not further.
Night or day, in every grass-blade there is a blinding-bright beauty detonating in total silent anonymity.
Only allow that beauty to enter, to penetrate your heart, and, exactly because you are more actively constructed and construed than a blade of grass, you are able to see, to experience with your conscious awareness the glorious Sufficiency of You in all your innate beauty and latent power.
When that occurs, inspiration, the lack of it, pain, or the lack of it, in fact all states or stages of being in life click into their own place.
That place is where time began and ends. Where love and peace pertain. Like the Tardis, it is a LOT bigger on the inside than on the outside!
. . .
And the maelstrom of moments in which our beauty dances, exists as EveryNow.
“Love is the thread which weaves the empty sky with birdsong
~ Love is present EveryNow”
Homecomings!
Homecomings!
Isn’t homecoming one of the supreme joys I can hope for by working to remain hand in hand with my original self?
Homecoming comes to me!
I am home in my gratitude and celebration of the reality of the wild and glorious spaces I do in innocence and truth inhabit.
Only let me to pause and open up my heart and allow myself to see the spaces.
When I see them, I accept them and in the acceptance I rest easy.
I find the peace that is waiting to greet me among the fiery wildness and power of my everyday sublime, and it is enough. It satisfies. It is accepted and wholly sufficient.
“My cup runneth over” eyes open or closed, night or day, sick or whole. Only let me run outside now and share this
~ Love is present E v e r yN o w
CRESCENDOS of expressionlessness
CRESCENDOS of expressionlessness
EveryNow is in the presence of the original peace of the universe
EveryNow always comes garlanded by love
Peace is omnipresent in you and in me
Peace is in the arrival of our knowing in truthfulness
We are made from peace
Peace is in every thing we care nothing about
Peace has no need of a name
Peace does not need to be touched to exist
The expression of peace is in crescendos of expressionlessness
Love is the answer to which
No question exists
~ Love is present
E v e r yN o w
Nightmares notwithstanding
#Nightmaresnotwithstanding
“*This can’t go on*”
This morning I dreamed I was at my shared desk in a dark office. Someone lit up a cigarette. So I stopped and looked for my tobacco and papers. I didn’t know where I’d put them.
Then I remembered my boss and colleagues would be back after the weekend, and I had not yet picked up the phone to contact a single sales prospect.
The dread of unmet obligation to achieve my sales target came back to hammer me down…
I thought,
“This can’t go on. I will resign. I’ll go look for a new job in the morning.”
In stages, with a struggle like freeing myself from burial alive, I began to see it.
I gave up smoking in 1994.
I no longer work in an office. Not since 2010.
And at last I see. I am not awake, but dreaming it all.
The stresses and trauma involved in the 9 to 5 obligation to provide, to produce, to submit at any cost is the lot of millions.
I worked 42 years. I retired nine short years ago.
I remind myself daily how I used to gaze at the flocks of aerobatic pigeons through the office window.
I hear myself pledge that, after I retire, I would rejoice.
I would rejoice in my freedom to stare for a long time at pigeons in flight.
And so I do! I rejoice every single day and am thankful to have one more reason to be grateful I am alive.
Nightmares notwithstanding, love IS present EveryNow
The brilliance of existing
I write of the brilliance of existing.
When I write, I am representing in one way or another a self-similar fragment of the brilliance of the peace and love we all come from and to which we all return.
The brilliance reveals itself here, under the next leaf, there beneath the water’s ripple. It is behind old grief, and it is always always always after my next blink. It is EveryNow!
“Peter,” you say,
“You are defo in the zone of Zen.”
Yes, maybe so.
You are the one who says so about me. It is not just the me you see. It is you who says you see.
Whatever the zone is, even if the zone is ignored, denied, unsuspected or invisible under examination, it is you, it is I, it is ineradicably eternally in you and in I.
Because it shines in all sentient beings, and because all sentient beings take shape and form from all things, the zone of Zen you say you see is as in and of you as it is of me and of EveryThing.
We all return to the brilliance of the peace we come from and the heart of love which animates and sustains us.
The brilliance is here for me to see in every blink and breath. It behoves me to remind you of it in the words I say and in the glance I cast.
If love is present EveryNow, due attention ought to be drawn to its brilliance – a splendour which touches us every one deeply, if we know it, or if we know it not!
~ Love’s presence EveryNow
* A Guidance for Self Renewal *
* A Guidance for Self Renewal *
I ask you to listen and take part in the pictures and scenes I place in front of you. For some, this is a way to leave the distractions of thought to one side, and enter a state of reverence and intimacy with yourself in which you can access a welcoming tranquility and be open to self-renewal.
… … …
Breathe in and let the breath out. What you are doing in a real down-to-earth way is beginning renewed life.
Our own independent life begins with a breath. You connect to air with your breath. You begin to live every time you take a breath.
Air is everywhere present. At all times air is in touch with your body. Air circulates in your blood stream, and it is available to every cell of you, all your life long, from birth to death.
Breath, like thought, has an existence as a flow. There are unanswerable mysteries connected to the act of breathing.
We are exotic life forms. We are five-pointed star-creatures who walk on a planet blanketed by an air layer.
Remind yourself that you share this same life-sustaining, planet-wide, breathable shell of air with every other breather on this Earth.
Breathe and hear your breath as it enters and leaves you. Feel your connection to the wider mystery of the breath of life.
Whether your breath escapes you in silence, in sobs of pain, out of joy, or is totally unregarded, automatic, you and your breathing is a universal link to your own life force and to the living energies of all fellow sentient beings.
Consider trees and people. Trees breathe in and out as people do.
There’s no point in criticising them for how they are. In their lifetime, trees are influenced to grow into all their shapes by the earth, their ecology, and weather.
It’s what trees do.
Trees do not make judgements about us, the people who pass by in the presence of their sober livingness.
It is right to remind ourselves that each and every person we meet has become who they are through the circumstances of their lives.
If we can see ourselves and others in the wholehearted simple way that trees accept us the way we are, then great burdens of judgement, resentment, even fear will fall from our hearts and dissolve away!
It is largely the operation of our chattering ego which raises each one of us into first person fame or notoriety. We may think we are in control of our decisions most of the time. It is the mind that tries to assume operation of this control.
So much anxiety and frustration is the result of a heart thwarted in the pure expression of its singing voice by the clamour of mind. The mind makes up scripts and stories to fit its primitive worldview.
It’s what the mind does.
And yet, how easy it can be to see through the mind-fog and become aware of the song of the heart!
It is this harmony which is ever-present at our still centre. It is the same natural wisdom heard in the melodies which the heart plays which guides other sentient beings most of the time.
Why not for us as well?
When the swirl of the mind smokescreen is stilled and settles out, our original self, our guilt-free innocent self emerges. And it is not our individuality which shines out, but the constant light of our heart’s peace. This is the source of undying love from which we originate and to which we return.
Whatever the different shapes, both visible and invisible, that the living of our lives have carved into us, we all share one humanity. We share qualities, frailties, susceptibilities. And we share mighty strengths and talents, limitless gifts.
When people say we have more things in common than separate us, they mean, “we are all members one of another”. The flock and the swarm better describes the human condition than any singling out of one or other of our essential human attributes.
Remember our common biological origins from the birth of life on Earth and remember our origins in common.
Starchildren made from stardust we may be, but for everyday tasks it is enough simply give a moment’s thanks and share the knowledge of our companionship and our interdependence on other air-breathing sentient beings, animal and vegetable.
The pain and confusion that sometimes hangs around you might not be real. The tyranny that it exerts might not be real.
Even the terror of the unfillable void which the absence of pain or confusion occasionally leaves behind might not be real.
Ask yourself if it seems possible, even practical, to wish pain away, to shoo it off?
… … …
I suggest now, here, you take a little time out to come back. Outside is influenced by the outside. Come back on an inward journey.
Sit at a table, listen to and be conscious of your own natural breathing.
Place one of your hands palm up, relaxed and at rest on the surface in front of you.
There is no expectation. There is no need to notice the things you were thinking and doing just now.
Where you are starting is where you will end. Be at rest.
You are breathing.
All’s well.
Let the time go by.
Let the time go.
Let go of time.
Let go.
Say it to yourself. Say this gently:
It is as it should be.
What I am and what I have is sufficient.
Look at one hand.
You have no need to enter into a relationship with your hand.
You and your hand go back a long way!
Familiarity, friendship, healing, connection are all here.
Neither you nor your hand have any secrets one from the other.
But your hand has an untold story to tell you.
Your palm is open, facing you. The fingers are resting, open. Together you have memories.
Keep your gaze on your palm at rest.
Let go of time.
Say it to yourself. Say this gently:
It is as it should be.
What I am and what I have is sufficient.
Where I am starting is where I will end.
Choose memories. Your own memories of pleasure.
You cup fresh water in sunlight.
You waft a fragrance towards you.
You touch the fingers of a loved one.
Breathe and be ready.
Do you notice a tiny movement? A small involuntary movement of your fingers?
You have no secrets from each other.
You see your fingers make movements.
You, your brain, your fingers are in a union of great intimacy, delicacy and simplicity.
No third party is present. It is safe to mutually love and adore.
Yes! Your fingers smile up at you!
As long as you breathe, your fingers will respond. It is their way of smiling back at you.
They are inclined to smile. It is just what fingers do.
Just like breathing, this is a lifetime companionship. Trust their tiny unfretful movements.
Let go. Smile at your own hand, and at the magic that is in the air between you.
That is all there is. Magic comes when love is given time and space.
If you should stop and find yourself at rest, make time for yourself, there is something you can do. I do it.
Put any smile on your face, and let it be your smile to your own heart. Eyes closed, touch your fingertips into your own heart in a peaceful moment of open enquiry.
You will see that all your heart ever wants to do, all it ever wanted to do, is to sing songs of love to the glory of you.
It’s what hearts do!
Let your hand do this gesture always with tenderness and respect. Smile to your heart. Eyes closed, smile to your heart with mouth, lips and eyes.
The more you smile together, alone together, the more your heart will feel to be brave to step into your life. To be in your life again. The way it was, as it always was, time out of mind.
A friend returns with love-light in the eyes.
This friend knows you far better than you can imagine.
This friend whose love will never fail you, nor let you down.
Whose wisdom is yours for the asking.
Yours the secret now!
You know the story your hand can tell you. It is a love story.
A story that is as precious, as valuable, as healing, as sustaining, as magic, as life itself. A story as beautiful as you.
~ Love is present EveryNow
The View at 72+ 