Category: Written journal

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Is it not incomprehensible that thin stems of dead grasses, or reeds, they bend to every gale and rain storm and they remain upright.

They display the same gentle curvaceous grace as when they were still alive among the bees and butterflies so many weeks before?

I know people who are like this…
❤️

Only let go

Let yourself let go.
Give yourself up to yourself.
You are beautiful. You are love

~ Love is present EveryNow

Keys to unlock Self Love

It is wasteful and demeaning to ignore beauty or to pass beauty by on the other side of the road.

It is befitting and constructive to allow beauty to enter the six senses.
All living things are superlative in their own right. All sentient beings attentively and compassionately witnessed reveal their superlative core.

Yellow Buddleja just happens to be more superlative than itself!

It is nourishing and revealing to meditate attentively on those elements in my own heart and soul which beauty touches and resonates with.
Here are the secret – and not so secret – keys with which to unlock Self Love
~ Love is present EveryNow

*Meditation on Nourishment*

*Meditation on Nourishment*

It is the need of the warrior to be nourished to perform the rituals of survival.
Those who are in the glare of the warrior’s Sun, take courage, another form of nourishment.
The warrior beats the drum alone in a big green place, and nourishment flows back to the centre from the edges of the big green.
We are the living embodiment of the nourishment created by the Sun, our loving and beloved star.
Nourish the mind and the heart and the Soul will gladly shine. In gratitude, it will simply open mine eyes to the brilliance of the green, and the love that sparkles in the watching eyes

Wild lamentations of personal grief 

There is a field of human endeavour identifiable by the vocabulary of its skeletal airtight constructs and its conceptual legal abstractions.

There are entities, such as the Law, and Organisations, Associations and Companies, which owe the basis of their existence to definitions alone.
Their state of being rests on highly polished words with small areas of meaning embedded in permissive agreements, which themselves hang uninfluenced by Newton’s law of universal gravitation in the air of abstraction.
Read rejection into redundancy? Read earthquake into termination? I say it can be most illuminating to read post-holder into employee!
During the 80’s and 90’s, I was the subject of five redundancies.
My first was a revelation. It was a blue-sky day in May. I returned from Iunch hour to my desk punctually at 2pm. I had had many praises for my work in sales, which was a new departure for me, as I was more used to general clerical work.
I was summoned to the company boardroom. Here the Managing Director and the Finance Director sat at the long hardwood table. At five past two, here I was served with a notice of redundancy.
It was to be the first of five in the next couple of years.
I was struck by the wild lamentations of personal grief of other work colleagues at the sudden shock of receiving their own notices of redundancy.
They regarded their company as a second family, and ascribed familial affections, loyalties or aversions to some of their co-workers.
I knew a couple of people who suffered badly from the shock of redundancy, never able to handle this technical act of Letting Go. I saw one man descend immediately into the abyss of mental torment, compounded by alcohol and drug abuse.
I witnessed his appalling spiralling losses, first of financial independence, soon family breakup, health issues compounded by a drunken fall downstairs leading to surrender to depression, domestic squalor and isolation.
Within three hours on that lovely spring day in May 1988, I had fulfilled my desire to drive to the flower-filled Cannizaro Park during normal working hours, and I made a photographic study, in serene solitude, of the fabled alleyway of Golden Rain blossom.
I had also had a consultation with a lawyer to verify the validity of the terms of my redundancy, and I had arranged my first job interview!
I call myself fortunate to clearly see an employing company for what it is, an abstract legal construct.
I see myself, an employee, simply as the holder of a post. I was never family, I never had the right to any other reward for what I did when I occupied that post beyond the narrow boundaries of the definitions which proscribed me there.
In the technical jargon, the word redundancy is rinsed of all human connotations, such as hugs or kisses, and signifies the point when two parties are deemed to agree they have arrived at the point when they no longer are bound by their contract of obligation to one another.
It was sad to see such quantities of unnecessary emotion expended when the lives of some of my office friends were felt so strongly uprooted in this way.

Woe to people who mistake the abstract definitions of others for the reality of their own existence, for they waste their time sleepwalking blind, eyes open only to their illusion!

What is

What is, is not the unitary and oblivious carelessness of what is, but the glowing strength of the is-ness animating it.
This insight is what moves from inside of me to share. It is the inside of me. I am inside all humanity because is-ness comes dancing and skipping before any question like, “Is it?”
It is the same for the inside of every one of us, we knowing it, or it all unknown to us.
Only make visible to others what brightness makes visible!
Here are the wonders of the mirror!

Delight is up side down side inside and out.

All the world loves a lover.
Therefore be love!
Be love! Float and glow with tides of the foamy briney stuff of which your life and my life is made and which makes all life loving and alive
~ Love is present EveryNow

💠I am a time traveller🔷

💠 I am a time traveller 🔷

Crises shake me awake, so that I believe I have little choice but to pay attention and attempt to understand the storms, conflicts and extremes of opposing emotion that roil and boil inside me.

I know that the stirrings in me which crises cause are like clear waters suddenly made muddy. I know the dread of that vanished transparent calm where all was clear and simple to see.

The plateau of my heart’s ease, where grass is green, and no wind ruffles, is a gift to be accepted. The calm of uneventful days is like the sunshine on an airborne jet – I trust revolutions of power beyond my ken are churning on the inside, keeping me safe.

I accept the days of “nothing doing” are like when I neck the first drink of cool water in the morning. I absorb bright colourless refreshment in the certainty it will reach into my darkest roots.

But I also know to stand back from insisting to myself that I must thrash out sense and meaning out of turbulent emotions. Danger of death inside, or at the very least, the drear drag of continuing ignorance, is the reward for fruitless fight with my own shadows.

I have learned that the swirl of sediment that now blinds my view of where I am going is composed of mysterious particles!

These are the smashed up, mashed up micro fragments of old certainties.

I do not tread them into the dirt. They are more valuable than gold dust, more alive than my own breath, because, unlike mud which petrifies into rock on settling, I know they will recrystallise into brand new beauty.

My road which was secure is now blazing into a lava flow. My tears explode as they fall! My past mistaken faith in my own limited abilities have taught me to give up my Quixotic tilting at mental windmills. I trust that faith and unconditional hope in compassionate powers far stronger than any of my own will arrive, soothe me, and build my new spiritual bones.

I know I will give myself the gift of time, waiting in faith and trust. My roots are active, though I neither hear nor see the least motion.

This is how trees await Spring, and birds the Sunrise.

I will have stood aside and observed the swirls of pain in my chest. I will have felt them retch up my throat. I will have committed to memory the dried tears I see on my own face.

And, at the end of all of this, I will see walking towards me, with the magical mutual smiles of recognition spreading over both our faces, myself and I, as we fall into an embrace for the first time

~ Love is present EveryNow

Giggle

Email to a new Friend about to go travelling…

It’s Full Moon.

Where we come from is largely known to both of us solely from the personal presence shown by one to the other.

It is a transparently good place or I should not be writing you this.

The direction where we are going is a mutually encouraged movement which has all of the same attributes as those of a grand meal – expectation of savours, many unknown – but without any sense of fear or alienation.

Cleave to your journey, O pal.

Stay alert, record and share, discuss and digest.

Be open, humble, respectful of all you meet, judge none, avoid none, give full attention.

The butterfly effect operates only at such a distance that it is out of sight. Your smile is seen. You move on. That life-affirming energy aroused by your smile may engender springs of hope in individuals, families, cities, entire populations which you cannot and need not understand.

All you need to understand is that you have immense latent power. It is the power of choice to smile.

Turn away only from those whose minds have diverted far from life’s glory that they see only negation and fear. You do not need to be smeared, in mind, heart nor body.

Only see the myriad tiny things, because in the end our lives are upright and we survive only because we are intimately and eternally supported by the microcosm of everyday sublime simple beauty.

Never ever pass up the chance to giggle.

With love

As ever

What is there?

What is there

between

the in-breath and the outbreath?

Nothing to do

and

all the time in the world

to do it

~Love is present EveryNow

My heart did beat with the same exquisite archeologist’s excitement

A paste diamanté broach, abalone, a big and a small Southbourne beach shell, a Guy Fawkes nite rocket cone, an aluminum (sic) cocktail stick, a fractured quartz crystal, a Psion Organiser motherboard, and all these are supporting cast to a precious shard of circa Victorian china with partial inscription.
62 years ago, two friends used to delve into a Victorian rubbish heap. This communal midden was only about two yards long by one yard wide. I never revisited it again. But I still keep its precise location in my head.
We discovered it on a field edge just over the hedge from a freshwater spring beside a farm labourer’s thatched cottage vegetable garden. This freshwater spring served the households in two cottages across from my parents cottage. It was one of six or seven thatched cottages which are shown on the map in the Domesday Book completed in 1086AD.
It is in a hamlet whose signposted name “Sedrup” is suffixed by the intriguing word “Only”. It is at the end of a winding single track lane, marked as a No Through Road where it branches off the A-road at a historic coaching inn.
The Lane, as we affectionately referred to it, is this No Through Road. It was where a flock of sheep were driven the half mile from the farm at the top to the grazing pasture of the lower farm. It used to be bordered by bountiful hazel bushes that filled the cottage wives’ wicker baskets in the autumn. It ends at a large, roughly oval open green, with the thatched dwellings scattered around it.
That green space, removed from traffic, much munched by comfortably bulky milking cows, used to be Commonland. The cottagers had the right to graze their donkey, horse or goats on it. We’d been told a donkey used to live in the barn portion of our own cottage. I remember the beaten earth floor and the faint smell of hay. In the early 1950’s my parents converted it into living space. The architect for the plans was my father’s brother, an FRIBA.
In the 1960’s, the farmer put up a barbed wire fence. The cows were thus prevented from accidentally wandering into the garden, an occasion for high drama. And the small boys and girls of this sleepy hamlet found they were cut off from the delights of insect-filled flowering grasses.
My Father petitioned and lost a well-argued claim to have this ancient Right Of Commons preserved. I still have the judgement document. It disappointed him greatly.
There is no vehicular way beyond the small collection of cottages. But a long straight Bridle path bordered by arable lands leads away towards views of the distant Chiltern Hills.
Fantastic adventures on this path! Discovery of sun-smelted cornfields, and mad March hares, incredible coloured butterflies, wonderful complicated hedge tangles, and cornflowers, crickets, small limestone fossils. My own voice and I, chatting to one another, and singing songs out loud, as loud as I pleased, singing out loud to the four winds!
In one of the thatches, with yardthick mud and wattle walls, I spent some of my earliest and most formative years. There was no electricity, no gas, and no running water. We drew water up in galvanised buckets from our garden well. My parents bought the pair of cottages in 1936.
Electricity arrived in early 1960. Mains gas and running water had still not been laid when I came to sell the cottages in 1982 in the year of my Father’s death.
My older pal, next door neighbour Graham, and I would search by hand for pretty pieces of broken crockery in the Victorian midden. Among these we found many fragments of blue Willow Pattern, a few mysterious mauve pieces whose colour deeply moved my boyish mind.

We unearthed broken stems of old white clay tobacco pipes, and decorative opaline glass shards.

But what we were both concentrated on unearthing was Gold! A very few broken plates, cups and saucers bore gold leaf trim. These and the other windfall were our currency and our Treasure Trove.
The name my ‘Splendid’ Graham friend and I gave to this old midden was “The Gold Field”.
We boxed our finds. We kept them close. I came across my hoard recently in an old SMA baby milk powder tin. It had remained close through at least six home relocations over six decades.
Until the day of Heike Jenkin’s art workshop “Recreating Reality” on December 10th 2016, in Southbourne-on-Sea, I had not set eyes on the inscribed fragment (pictured) for 62 years.
As I glued it in place on my canvas, my heart did beat with the same exquisite archeologist’s excitement of that young boy so very many brilliant summers gone by
~ Love is present EveryNow

↪📵B⚠D🚫↩

⚠Bad News⚠
Odd, isn’t it?
The swaying grasses,
the colours of flowers,
the rustling bushes,
the upgrowing trees,
all of the busy tiny creatures,
those birds, these bees.
💚 Absolutely none have been stilled
by The Bad News!
If I want to feel freedom’s wild kisses,
if I truly want to snuggle close
to my original self,
I walk out.
I walk far out of reach of the news…
and as I go, I cast smiles and catch smiles
💚 Smile! This is the Big Green
The news about all our human doings
Is of no consequence whatsoever
to the birds and the beetles.
💚 Their headline news, their editorial,
all the way down to the stop press,
is about the ecology
right and left
seen and unseen.
💚 I am always welcomed in the Big Green
to observe with love and respect
the sweetly earnest business of survival.
💚 Here calm runs up to me,
from my left,
from my right,
to hold me by my hands
~ Love is present EveryNow 💚

a happy ripple in a continuum of life

My state is open and aware and quiet.

The self I call “I” is a flat calm transparent natural boundary. Clear water is deep down, air is deep up.

The surface is almost colourless, without ripple or feature. It extends without horizon, but never leaves my sight.

In such a state I can ride and stay in balance during the time I am presented in the here and now with thoughts, feelings, distractions and discomfort.

Here, from my surface I offer this.

It is through my extraordinary journey of unanticipated heart awakening, around the time I began the regular practice of Biodanza in February 2013, that I know I can fully access healing. That, together with other understandings related to identification of ancient hurts and the resolution of previously unrecognised confusions, have granted my awareness of myself the opportunity of expansion and room in which to expand.

As I become self-aware, aware of the sanctity of the gift of life being lived and experienced more and more abundantly, so in equal measure I value the gift of life in relation to other living sentient beings.

What comes from living in such a new and richly jewelled life is a greater gratitude than I have ever known. It has far reaching implications on my remaining days of life. It is the ever-growing understanding that my life is not a discrete occurrence only in me. I am a pixel of humanity, and life is living through all things and beings, sentient and not sentient.

I am a happy ripple in a continuum of life. Life lives me as I live life.

Here’s the thing… Nothing has changed! Everything is utterly different and constantly completely new! The newness is “EveryNow”.

I begin. My journey of exploration and discovery begins all over again from the very start every moment. Nothing existed in the previous instant of this awareness of existence to guide me to where I am. At any given moment, I look forward with barely containable excitement to the certainty of discoveries in the moment following.

I think of it like this. For the first fifty years I had been “Living to Love”, which is decorous, pretty, even beautiful, but it is an existence limited by inconsequential superficiality.

As my heart awakes and presents its face towards me to greet me, my heart starts “Loving to Live”.

This is the wholesome, plain and simple adoption of the richly textured reality of here and now, of “EveryNow”.

I am no longer secreted away in a place of safety of my own elaborate construction, but I go shining with gratitude and wonder at the mere fact of being vital and alive.

This is a state of being which is totally raw, exposed and vulnerable, but simultaneously full of living courage, and naked certainty.

Unencumbered by fear, my state of being can freely develop in its self-expression in the knowledge that it has its permanent residence in the secure environment of the heart’s pure and spectacular peace.

We are all capable of healing.

It’s about trusting love to come into close contact inside my most personal sacred space, and knowing that there, in that serene place of peace, I can heal.

We all just can

~ Love is present EveryNow

Moon-grace come !

Full Moon – harbinger over my seaside home village – shows the way to abundant forgiveness,

plain truths of heart’s love,

desire,

and the plenishments of the fruit of gratitude.

Full Moon – risen so many times over my seaside home village – lights up every thing.

Her rays flume with a nameless unearthly dignified contact…

extra Awe-dinary’

Surfeit? Surf it!

Surfeit? Surf it!

“The greatest difficulty
is the mental resistance
to things that arise,
and the underlying assumption
that they should not.” ~ Eckhart Tolle

… ° …

One of the ever-present sweetnesses available to us is to cast a compassionate glance towards the chaotic and the frenetic and the inexplicable.

Then to look inwards at the heart’s own orderly equanimity and to see no divide, no boundary, but a standing-wave, a crest of peace.

❤️

There is no peace

There is no peace.

Peace is living us in our heart’s love EveryNow

A Spoken Lullaby by Peter Pilley .wav – SoundCloud

A Spoken Lullaby

Listen to A Spoken Lullaby by Peter Pilley .wav by peterodactyl #np on #SoundCloud

From Breath to Love

From Breath to Love – A guided meditation

TUESDAY 25th SEPTEMBER was the monthly Breathwork session “From Breath to Love – Conscious Breathing Circle” held by Karolina Mikulicz here in our home town.

When I arrived, I was the only one attending! So we agreed to have a 1-2-1 session.

After what happened to me in the last fortnight, I was in a state of high sensitivity and receptivity. I may share in another piece of writing, when I feel to gather the story together. It’s enough to say I had begun to make preparations in the last few days in the light of reasonable cause to believe the days of my life were numbered. It transpires that I am in no such danger. This is relief that I compare to being hit by a ton of bricks.
Karolina is, to me, wise far beyond her young years. Knowing how she has assimilated the healthy therapeutic effects of her own daily Breathwork practice over many years, I have come to have complete confidence in her skills as guide and facilitator. We always reach deep when we work together.
So, to be brief, (a tricky skill for me!) an obscuring chunk of cliff face fell away… almost all resistance due to fear melted away as if under high intensity radiation.
In the course of this evening’s guided Breathwork I found my core being, I call it: my unchanging awareness. I found my unfractionated identity, I see it as a white transparency with no material substance yet having the form of a swan’s body and whose being is available in maximal energy to enfold with arms, protect without limit or condition, to imbue me with life-power while not at all concealing or covering me.
In 1977, I had come face-to-face with this core essence of my being with the common descriptor being a white-hot kernel. The image of a light concentrated into white heat had arrived then. During my awakening in 2013, and ever since, up till today, the vision of awareness of my own heart has been of an orange-gold glow in my heart space.
In summer 1977, I entered a period of pain and incomprehension, and an involuntary process began. One by one, layers of self identity fell away from me. I felt with great alarm that I was soon to lose my sanity. At length all that was left of this 31 year old man, of his certainty and his received assumptions about himself was reduced to a white-hot molten pool resting immobile at the bottom of a huge immovable crucible.
Today’s “Real”isation arrived as a direct effect of having been able to release all vestiges of fear of trying and seeking by walking in the bravery of trust and innocent belief in the total support of the earth under me and the clean oxygen I fill my lungs with.
Something changed tonight.
There was no upheaval and certainly no pain. Pain comes only as an equal and opposite reaction to resistance. Abandon of resistance and its replacement with the gentleness of compassion and a childlike humility is what characterised the session this time. Karolina threw at me unanswerable questions. She stayed, guided and was by my side. I responded from my truth.
Later, at the end, we talked. This is how I tried to make clear what had changed inside during the latter part of our working session. A sacred chant that I remember I had sung before, and whose Sanskrit words I had learned, had been playing in the background. I was not the listener with this music in my ears. The music was playing me and my hearing was the music playing. The music was playing in me. I was conscious of not being the listener. I had no involvement in the joining of the music with my hearing.
A blending took place that I was fully aware of as it happened. I have entered a fusion between my core original self and the sensory experience of the material World around me.
Here I can not go all the way with words to describe this. I was totally receptive to the music while not needing to make any conscious effort at distinguishing it as musical sounds to which I was paying attention. The effect was of music happening in the way my blood happens to circulate in my body. The music was involuntarily musical in me. This utterly new experience was welcome and most lovely. I felt with all my senses and all my awareness the freshness of it.
With this clearing, whatever happens next, my lack of fear of my own death has received a big boost.
Karolina suggested I write up about this session. My thanks to Karolina takes the form of this short description.

An Angel asked a Ghost

An Angel

Who had

Never

Been in love

Asked a Ghost

Who had,

“What was it like?”

The Ghost said,

“Like being in life”

Dismal

Dismal Southbourne

The heat of summer,

the dazzle have done a runner.

The vacant hands of after dusk seem to say,

Turn away.

But in this street,

with autumn near and summer far,

Mine eyes see a glimpse of Shangri-la