How rough the sea surface can be! Violent till we can’t swim or sail. Such storms hardly bother those whose lives and times continue below the surface.
Around ten years ago, I had a vision of the state of my own soul.
I saw a vast flat expanse, a fine natural boundary between water and air. This boundary stretched outwards to the visible horizon and on further still. It had signs of disturbance and of disturbance which had passed over. Below was uncountable deep liquid. Above it were unimaginable heights of bright air. This flat colourless entity took on the colour of the moment. The colour was peace, placid tranquility and a strong flavour of welcome void.
~ Love’s presence E v e r yN o w
Some ten years later, in 2024, I can see, hear, feel, taste, smell and touch gently into this vision. I do so with gratitude and humility for the opening into unconditional love that it was and is. Though the vision was fleeting and immense in scale, it was in me, of me and on as small a scale as me.
*Suddenly with a blinding glare of recognition like a bright epiphany*
It happened suddenly at the end of a lovely afternoon taking tea for the first time at home with a special Friend and mutual confidante, one with whom I had had long intimate conversations up until then, but only through text messages.
And so it happened. Suddenly a giant door to my understanding began to open and light began to glow and I saw something mirrored inside me.
My Friend, Susie Gareh Minto, was visiting me at home, where I was convalescing after a hip replacement operation in 2014.
For a couple of hours, we had been discussing life in the way good friends so enjoy. My naturally joyful, expressive, extrovert Friend was much elated and in full flow, when she did a simple thing, but it surprised me greatly as I sat in my armchair.
She suddenly got up out of her armchair and, speaking very loud, she demonstrated over me how it all “is” for her by standing with her arms out, hands reaching to hold the sky.
Shortly after, it was time to go. And we went out into the garden.
As we spoke our farewells outside, we embraced, quietly.
What was – continues to be and always will be time without end – so exceedingly exciting, is the full and total realisation, which simply “arrived” for me, of the being that I am.
The excitement of the realisation has a curiously calm and matter-of-fact quality. The best way I can describe the unique authenticity of this emotional and intellectual understanding is exciting and matter-of-fact at one and the same time.
I wrote to my Friend shortly afterwards, “For this delicious process of enlightenment, I have much to be thankful for.”
My friend wrote back, “What can I say, except – beautiful news. It is a lovely authentic connection that you have entered into.”
What Susie wrote next was inspired, and I knew immediately that she described the unlocking and the throwing away of the key to the place I had imprisoned myself in for so long.
I have set my Friend’s words into a first person singular narrative, and added here and there my own authenticity…
I am sure a great unlocking has taken place and now I can enter into finding and realising a much greater fullness of love from within.
In fact throughout all my apparent external and very surprising rushes of loving connection that I have been making in recent months, perhaps all along it was that I have been repeatedly shown my own amazing deep pool of love within.
But I had been ‘mistaking’ the beautiful vision as being a ‘love’ that needed to be sought and expressed externally.
The process of opening had begun, and I was reaching out from inside my dark home-made fortress place. I had constructed it with extreme thoroughness and efficiency during the years of my early childhood.
However, I had carried on sheltering in such darkness well beyond its usefulness for several decades.
I owe an immense debt of gratitude and respect to my inner child who had protected me by drawing on his own primitive source of love. He built defensive fortifications. These served me very well as a necessary place in which to survive.
It was not so much a place of darkness, as a place sequestered from “light”. In truth, there is no darkness, only a passing in front of light. I am talking about the light of human connection, and indeed all forms, from simple conversation to the most universally revered sacred connections.
When those first cracks of light had started pouring into my own dark space, I believed – as is probably natural – that I was finding something exciting outside of myself, when in reality all along what was being revealed to me was my own marvellous light!
For more than half a century, I lived on in the dark. I know I am far from having been alone in spending time at one remove from the full experience of living life in all its abundance and glory.
I knew about the majesty of light and peace, and about the love that can take root and flourish in it. But I neither saw nor yet recognised my own portion of light directly.
The most amazing thing is, when I am fully present in my own light, it connects healthily with the light of others, and in so doing we quite simply reflect each other’s light.
Each time we allow this to happen, with the courage of open hearts, we receive a beautiful and healing reminder of the brightness of our own light.
This is truly it – for me, for us, for the world. We are beacons of light and our challenge is to realise that the light we see outside is a reflection of the light we are inside.
So now, I can be a worshipper as I move in the world of the everyday sublime, in reverent awe at the joy of the little “ten thousand” things all around me wherever I go.
These continual acts of reflective worship continue to allow the light of my original love to shine out, and keep it shining.
From here, without fear or harm, I can acknowledge another’s light by reflecting to them what they see mirrored in me.
I remember always, I respect and honour always that this is their own light and they are the guardian of their own light.
I do believe the light within all sentient beings has no beginning and no end and I believe it is our connection to the eternal, the divine, the universal vector of all life everywhere
The attractive power of these images depends largely on the natural flower colours on which the algorithms work. The pleasure in these patternings is connected with the organic chaos made by the application of geometry algorithms.
The inside is always bigger than the outside when the eyes of my eyes see
Colours found in the worlds of animal, vegetable and mineral, when placed side by side, do not clash, displease or revolt our senses. Musical notes we produce are harmonious to us, with few exceptions.
I often wonder who can tell me more about our human perceptions of the natural environment and our ways of relating, on varying scales of pleasure, to the colours and organic forms we see throughout the natural world on the one hand, and the harmonies of musical sounds we produce or hear on the other hand?
For sure, the answers relate to human beings themselves as organisms seamlessly intrinsic to this natural world which births us all.
The Lunar Excursion Module in Chettle Village, Dorset
Imagine!
I finished my solo guided backpack walk with https://foottrails.co.uk/ at the renowned Casteman Hotel in Chettle in 2013.
Chettle sits off the A354, and I saw it as the prettiest of charming English country villages. It came complete with duck pond, villager-run general store, and farm. Later on, I learned of the now famous annual Chettle Village Fête. I had a memorable time there one summer afternoon. SEE https://chettlefete.co.uk/
I set about taking snaps of one of the thatched cottages with its classic flower garden in full summer sunshine.
I greeted a retired gentleman of noble bearing, who walked out of the front door. We fell into conversation.
It turns out that, at that period, the whole of Chettle village, plus surrounding farms and lands, “belonged”, in a somewhat Feudal English way, to his wife.
Today some of these lands have been sold off, so their ownership is more fragmented. That man and I got on because we shared some experiences in common as teenagers in the 1960s in Geneva.
Then he told me this.
Earlier that year, he was in the little historic Knightsbridge pub, The Grenadier, near Hyde Park Corner, London. https://g.co/kgs/2AzF6Vz
He fell into conversation with an American tourist. This man said he works with NASA on the Moon landing craft. They manufactured two identical Moon Rovers, to be able to replicate and solve possible problems with the one on the Moon surface in real time.
He was in London to give a talk at the Science Museum, South Kensington, illustrated with the NASA Lunar Excursion Module entrusted to his care.
The man agreed to meet up as his guest at Chettle Village, which the American gent was curious to see as an example of typical Old England.
Some time passed, and he arrived together with a trailer, on top of which was the fully functional Lunar Excursion Module.
Picture these men with their broad smiles, taking turns driving along the single track Chettle Village main street at full throttle, which was around 20mph.
I locate my fear in my stomach as I hear the sudden, unaccustomed sounds of so many children’s voices reverberating in a huge bare-walled room on my first morning in junior school.
SW1
I feel his chin stubble on my face, as my Father kisses me good night. Smiling, I hear myself say, “Do it again”.
Hyde Park Corner
I am wrapped in delight and surprise, when I hear the sequence of notes of my own Mother humming “Jesu Joy Of Man’s Desiring”. We are walking hand in hand along the busy main road to the bus stop.
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
Last in line, I am standing close to my first bright salamander. I am greedy for the acrid scent of wild thyme in my nostrils. We are on our way to climb the hill.
Geneva
Safe on my own, happy in a foreign land, I feel the pavement all hot under my young sandalled feet. A coin in my pocket will soon buy me an exotic ice cream.
Rowledge
I am transfixed in bliss, aged only 17. It is my first sight of flesh-coloured azaleas in high summer. For the rest of my life, I am filled up by their shockingly sensual scent.
Sicily
I bring into existence again the scent of jasmine at dusk at the entrance to the ancient Greek theatre at Taormina.
W8
I remember with finest detail our first kisses. It is similar to letting myself fall into the pool from the high board.
W1
I see it again and again. The head of our firstborn is appearing!
When my flower comes to the end, it melts into the earth it rose from…
I am bursting to tell you that an opening into an understanding has appeared to me. It has made things much less complicated. It has removed shed-loads of stress and taken away my false sense of obligation to myself and others.
I began journaling daily from my year of heart awakening in 2013. The collected curated posts began to form into my EveryNow blog on WordPress in 2018. The urge to “share the love” spurred me on and on to add more and more to EveryNow.
The act of sitting down time and time again to compose a new journal is itself a form of focused thinking, of meditative practice. I never can tell where my train of thought will lead. I know it’s important to exert my skills of thinking to remain in truth and logic. What words and what structures I select need to serve truth and logic with clarity.
In November 2019, my mortality tapped me hard on my shoulder with a heart arrhythmia. My heartbeat suddenly went up to 162 and stayed there.
Whatever else might be about to happen to me, I knew I wanted to preserve and protect EveryNow as my legacy, my personal expression of my love of life. So while I waited my turn for surgery, I threw money at Facebook in order to extend and accelerate the geographic readership of my blog.
I created my Facebook page “EveryNow”. This form of advertising broadcasting has had some effect. A few tens of thousands have seen EveryNow who would never have known about it.
My troubling medical disturbance was mercifully cured, virtually eliminated, by a simple, short procedure in 2020, by another in 2023, and by a Pacemaker implant in 2024.
I saw relatively huge numbers of paid for “hits” with Facebook on EveryNow, tens of thousands of them, compared to my ordinary Facebook likes in mostly single digits. I am thunderstruck, by the complete absence of engagement from any of them, in the EU, the USA and the UK. Although I have had no dislikes, I received no likes and no comments.
What does this mean for comprehending the behaviour of my new audience? And what does this great indifference say to me, and tell me about my attempt to make ripples, plant seeds, create new webs of connection through the beloved child of my heart, EveryNow?
With my own online presence, I continue to see others, present like me, “Sharing the Love”. My having joined them enables me to see what I am trying to express and present more ‘in-the-round’.
In a much wider objective perspective, my almost daily on-line presence since 2013, is on the scale of one fish in a planet-wide ocean of fish. Add to those fish, all the fish in rivers and lakes, and I can visualise my self-image to the correct scale: infinitesimally small!
It’s gratifying that my blog shows signs that it may have begun to reach a critical audience mass where the audience is growing without my adding new blog posts. One or two per week are seeing my blog posts. Look, no hands! New followers are following from the old.
I used to magine readers would report to me their reactions and new conversations might grow wings of inspiration, spawn new communion.
In short, I reckoned that I have something of value, that I am saying something significant, and that there are people I don’t yet know who want to read more about what I am saying.
Every one of these assumptions and basic premises have no basis in fact!
My words are not set to catchy pop melodies, my ideas are not the stuff of viral jokes, catchy lyrics which spiral up the charts on fire, like fireworks in the sky.
My words are truths clad in pastel colours. They arise from identical wellsprings of humanity as the emotions of any other person.
What I report on is one presence among all the other presences. The main difference is that I happen to be broadcasting it. This is no cause for others to sit up and take notice. It is hardly a reason for others to open one eye to me. After all, as I never get tired of saying, “Love is present EveryNow”.
If my art consists in saying I am as human and as alive as you, this is sufficient for the moment in which my words and images interact with another person. More relevant still, it shows that this is amply sufficient for me also.
Here is the fork in the road. I have two choices according to what I think I have become.
My first choice is, I could choose to try again to enlarge EveryNow’s audience by financing more Facebook advertising. It can cost as little as one pound per day, and I am able to monitor the results closely.
By doing this, I can focus on the urgent calls of love that my heart, ears, eyes and mind shout out at every turn and step on my daily path. I can decide to completely devote my resources to give priority to the all-consuming feelings of urgency in the call to love that I find is so strong within me at all times.
So what’s it to be?
When my flower, my soul is not here any longer, when it comes to the end and it melts into the earth it rose from, it will remain as one of the myriad expressed forms of love forever.
One of the top attributes of this call to love is unabating newness. My emotional responses to external stimuli seem to react as if everything is continually new, everything is happening for the first time. This counterintuitive, even downright illogical, highly receptive ‘hypernew’ state contributes such a lot to my desire to share the love. I do recognise it as a state of Grace.
Gradually, step by step, since this awakened state came about in 2013, I have been prompted to acknowledge to myself the fact of my new 24/7 condition – so akin to bliss unshakeable – because of the mirroring I have received from those close to me whose integrity and honesty I respect.
In parallel to this broadening acceptance of who, and more significantly, of what I am, my own self-compassion, my self-love has grown up to increase and become real too.
Here is an example. The point arrived some time in 2020, when I fully understand my fear of death is fear no more!
The EveryNow blog offers other people what I see as unusual and precious about what is happening on the other side of that magic portal which opened to me in 2013. That’s why the Blog seems to be the bandwagon to leap onto!
My second choice is, I can step away from that image of me as one fish among trillions. I can shy away from the urge to increase, embellish, emblazon and enlarge my shadow under the sun. I can accept the concept of my membership of the Swarm of life. My life as a Pixel of Humanity is enough.
From the moment I fully understand what it means to be a Pixel of Humanity, I fully arrive at a place of pure acceptance, and purest peace, too! I know the simple joy of being alive, sentient and sensual. My acceptance of this disarmingly exquisite experience of mine, of loving to live, equates to that of any other beings, great or small, sentient or not.
It needs saying that the sensual aliveness I participate in, moment to moment, is flavoured by the delicious honey of gratitude for it all.
I hardly find it necessary to differentiate between the ecstacy I feel when an empathy moment arises that lets me savour my intimate proximity to a pebble, or to a flower ‘in the flesh’, never mind the delight of meeting with another loving, living being, animal or vegetable in deep heart’s communion.
Here’s the thing. After I have made the all important distinction between the quality of love and the quantity of the qualities of which love is the bearer, I no longer want or need to try to grasp at the latter, because the former shows itself to me as so comprehensively sufficient.
From the moment I unreservedly accept that my voice among many voices praising and extolling love is like a summer flower in a gigantic flowering meadow, every thought, every emotion is stripped of layers of meaning and becomes quite suddenly simply enough.
There is nobility in the unconditional broadcast of the tender, fragile vulnerability and impermanence of the rose. All flowering flowers have a thread in common with my own existence.
I am not unbreakable, I am not infinitely strong, I’m not physically immortal.
There is a difference between Rose and I. It is a clear message, a loud lesson. Why do I see any need for defence or attack? Where is the will to attack or defend situated within Rose?
Rose makes no judgement and no distinction concerning the recipient of its fragrant beauty. It has a nobility of presence inherited from its humility. I see even the thorns on the rose as an affirmation of its non-aggression, through its need to defend its own longevity, however brief.
Wherever I may stroll, nobility – this sacred quality of all alive life – can become apparent to and “ping” my consciousness with a little inrush of grace.
The nobility of life in its consummation resides in its wild untamed acceptance of humility as it goes on its singular way towards the collective meaning of its individual death
A portal to life’s glory opened to me in an unexpected and brilliant burst of inception in February 2013. It engulfed me, Peter Pilley, and straight away began to transform me. Some time passed before I discovered that I was experiencing an epiphany, a heart opening.
This wash of unknown emotions and revelations was so utterly new, when I tried to open my mouth to talk about this state of grace, I could not find the words in English! Slowly, I came to realise what had opened would forever remain open.
EveryNow speaks for itself. I write about the cultivation of a belief system linked to my personal view of the world I live in, in relation to the most sacred centre of my integrity. The belief systems my writings rely on and navigate by come from never-ending sources of ancient established spirituality. I hardly know what labels apply. The structures owe their existence to Zen, Taoism, Apophatic Mysticism, and to good old Powers of Positive Thinking, amongst others.
My day to day, moment to moment, intense experience of being newly alive and in life began with a starburst of gentleness. This delicious newness continues to demand I share it to the best of my ability.
I say the epiphanies I have lived can be available as positive transformative experiences to other people. My life story as I know it tells me I have nothing uniquely of my own making to impart to the world. I am so graced by the massive shifts in my life, I will not ignore them, nor keep them to myself. I am all about sharing, like friends, wonder-struck, in a scented, colourful garden for the first time.
I am just this guy with his blog and the delicious sense of being on fire with love flames that burn and consume nothing.
After this epiphany in 2013, I researched online, close questioned friends. I began to write a digital journal. I searched with urgent intensity to tease out meaning from my new condition of incandescent awareness.
During my first six doldrum decades, I neglected to hold communion with my heart. I had contented myself with “Living to Love”, which is pretty, but superficial. I knew I loved loving. I thought it enough to believe in love. My daily search for love was dedicated, thorough and systematic.
A time comes when the search for love somewhere outside of me becomes plainly pointless, like chasing shadows. When I begin Loving to Live from the heart is when I start to be remade whole again, which means I join in with humanity as yet another “Pixel of Humanity”
Today I am at peace and at ease with my experience of being alive in this completeness of sentience in the moment, a gift I call EveryNow. It amazes me how it still feels as astonishing, secure and as unremittingly brand new as it did at the start of my unforeseen gentle earthquake in 2013.
My EveryNow blog is not here to change you. I am not about promotion. I proffer no message, hold out no quick fix lists. You can read it as an organic journey of awakening. It may let you believe that the bliss and rooted peace which has found a happy home in me, can be yours too, if you “let go”, if you experiment with trying to avoid judgement, or stop discarding one choice over another. The potential at the birth of all choices has equal value.
It can be enough to “Chat to Things”. Concentrate your senses with fierce, daily and above all uncritical, unconditional loving attention on all the tiny nearby things and beings, wherever you sit, stand, walk or travel. And then? Will they chat back at you?
In 2018, my journal turned into the EveryNow blog, which you can see on www.everynow.blog by WordPress. I now have readers in roughly 30 countries. I am still adding to it. It’s rooting, branching, ever growing, much like a garden.
Mine are the everyday stories of someone who is daily willingly reliving the trauma of massive heart opening. I write of love, compassion and praise for the glories o9f living from the heart. I illustrate my blog posts mostly with my own photos or artwork.
“Every single activity of the mind or body can be experienced with a passionate focus, with no regard or need for “outcome”. Which, being intensely lived in the moment, releases burdens of acquisition and the trappings of results measured by time past or time future.”
That’s a paragraph lifted from my blog about my practice of Apophatic Bliss*.
Secondary questions about a mind or body experience being true or good or important become irrelevant, when the focus of my attention is conveyed by my innate senses of aliveness.
Aliveness here includes the tunnel vision awarenesses of the will to live, self-protection at a primary instinctual level, and my animal binary trigger sensitivity which I describe as,
“If it moves, it will kill me, or I will eat it”
Boreholes drilled by fine tuned inspection into the great questions tell me only I am going nowhere.
Instead, I gain the juicy satisfaction that arrives with my touching into the fabric of existence. I touch into the fabric of what is in the way sci-fi films show glowing symbols being manipulated in space two-handed on a holographic computer screen. This is a visceral enjoyment that has nothing to do with an intellectual understanding.
The act of melding my mind and heart with my perception of the what-is of existence totally satisfies me. I am filled with a mildness I compare to a much anticipated cup of cool water in my mouth from a natural spring.
Should I, on the other hand, think to examine, inspect, question or parse existence, the object of my attention disintegrates, and I am washed up, all arms and legs, on the shores of undoing.
Let’s look at a heart’s love with no object for its love to love ~
Let’s look at a friendship, a friendship with no prior history, and with one who shares similar perspectives. Here we step away from the familiar territory of Me and You, because the friendship I am looking at is completely new for me in one major respect.
The care and concern shown by my friend is unusual in that it is high on the scale of unconditional. As such, I cannot assume the qualities of this uniquely delicate and precious relationship are in any sense fixed or given.
I am become sensitive to the fact that my friend has no engagement with my personality, my turbidities, nor with my expressed opinions. I can see that any and all my words coming from my side of the conversation will affect the structure and fabric of our friendship. I realise that, in our conversations, I must tread with the same humility, awareness and anticipated excitement as I would when I enter a woodland about to awake to a springtime dawn chorus!
The maintenance of such a close, but not necessarily contiguous, relationship is of the order of a continually earned renewed privilege.
Friendly casual acquaintance, on the other hand, can be entered into like a ball game – with the energy of playfulness, which can include and accept the give and take of rough and tumble.
Relations with another, which are underpinned by a tacit unconditional mutual respect and the courage of curiosity, require a willing and continuing journey of study in self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-love.
In the tranquillity of such rarified and respectful interchanges, the resulting arrival at any sort of unconditional outlook means that the ‘hunter-killer’ element, or to use a less dramatic word, the element of self-interest is melted into insignificance.
Only join with another whose outlook has formed with such similarities to one’s own, and the relationship is potentially primed for depth, rather than brilliance, and shared explorations of peace, instead of irrational fear that might lead to conflict.
More welcome even than these shared explorations in depth, come the human warmths generated by a growing sense of mutual acceptance and security.
When I can assume I can go share a thought, or a few words, in full knowledge that I am taken seriously, with respect, and without any knee-jerk criticism, this is the time my mind and heart can drop all socially conditioned defences, and I know without the need to analyse that I am welcomed into a place of safety.
Here in such mutual equality is the potential for discovery of a vast wealth of low-level, undramatic shared experiences and mutual appreciation, where fulfillment is remarkable for its absence of competition or conflict.
In brief, I am describing a relationship of the human heart to love for which it has no object for its love to love.
This is the entrancing enchantment of being in love’s presence EveryNow
We live a few moments’ walk from the coast clifftop path at Southbourne-on-Sea. From here, look West, East and South over the long reaching fin of the north east Atlantic. Call it The Channel; call it La Manche.
The surface is forever breathing, changing, surprising, pleasing.
Today, it’s the teeming collective sea-lives I am visualising, as I stand sentinel, like a little lighthouse, and I open myself up once more with awe to my submariner senses.
I take my imagining under and my alter-image goes deep.
I am discoverable in the nakedness of the depths. I tense and relax inside of the almost limitless cubic salty kilometers.
I wander alongside the floating populations, the slow tribes, the single species. Giant extended families who move with one accord. And I too can float with the slowly, lowly, barely visible water-clouds of diatoms.
I strain a little to observe down towards the shallow floor, and I am entranced by the swaying dark slippery wavy forests of kelp. My flanks, my skin have become receptors of spatial data. As the pressing of the water increases, so the light diminishes.
My senses are minutely informed by the varied vibrations of frequencies within enormous bands of pressure. These extend from noises of top frothing waves to far abyss in realms of unimagined extent, ruled by silence and sacred, prehistoric lightlessness.
The shifts of temperature and pressure in these vast waters I compare, in my air-breather way, to the hourly, diurnal and seasonal colour changes of our familiar and welcome domed sunlit skies.
Let me salute the salty creatures, let me breathe a breath of gratitude for our brethren beasts, or great, or small, whose horizontal business of thriving alive counterbalances our own. We vertical humans are not alone!
[For the photo, my thanks to Zippo, loyal friend and guard to Heike Jenkins, DrumCircle leader extraordinaire]
The body heals. This fact is a major cause for gratitude and wonder.
The body heals in noiseless self-contained seclusion at a separate pace from the abstract world of thought and the constant impatient fluctuation of the primitive mind.
The way the intellect and the mind try to organise or fix the everyday world they tend to operate in holds little or nothing that concerns the snail-like patience of the body’s enormous potential for healing.
And yet, the giant propulsion systems on which the body depends, and from which it draws its hidden powers of healing depend on the awareness of thought to be left, with a respectful distance, in peace to operate.
These wondrous hidden powers need the mind’s cooperation. They need the courage of self-encouragement and they have a ready appetite for offers of material and environmental support.
A tree throughout its lifetime is entirely dependent on this type of aware protection and nurture from the humans with whom it shares its immediate environment.
The trees and we people are vulnerable as a flickering candle flame. Both need active protection from disasters which arrive from ignorance, hubris, self-harm, unchecked violent impulses, even blind malice.
So, my friend, I am a student of the gentle art of living, balanced between desire and postponement of desire.
A good rule of thumb? Always favour love of the Now over love of the past or future.
Can you imagine what it’s like to be acutely aware, out of long habitual repetition, aware of underlying larger reality most of the time? This can arise from the discipline of years of desiring to notice connections between material objects in terms of their historical constitution and their origins in archaeology, geology, astronomy, and cosmology.
If I so choose, I can become aware of the unified nature of everything, based on facts scientific. As I go on my way day by day, I will see the origins of all life on earth, even all the inanimate earth itself, share incontrovertible commonalities.
Only extrapolate the implications from the famous words in Joni Mitchell’s song, “We are stardust”. I do not place the concept on a shelf under a glass dome. It is one of my start points to bring my awareness to bear and connect any and every object with Life the Universe & Everything.
From a standing start, I used to assume, as a rule of thumb, that the life I occupy and live is “I” and “other”. In fact the concept of “me” as occupant of the life in me is a sad wrong-headed example of attempts to anthropomorphise domination of life.
No! Life lives me, period.
I believe, from my direct and continuing everyday experience, that ‘this life, which is superabundance of joy and love, has found an acceptance in my identity, and has assumed a proportion of my identity without my volition and with an attachment that never did nor ever will depend on my acceptance of it.’
In the old days, it used to work like this. Myself as an observer on one side, and on the other side, somehow independent of me, my senses take note of a scene, or of an object – animal, vegetable or mineral – and I, the observer, deal with it as a discreet entity, like a specimen under observation. This staid, well-trodden way of encountering and interracting with reality in my immediate surroundings is dualism: here is me and there is other.
This dualistic concept is pure human fabrication. It is a house of straw that will vanish in the next breeze. It so happens that there may seem to be too much work involved in unpicking the straws in this age-old house of straw. If so, finish your days on earth in the image of a player in a Role Playing Game. This is waste too catastrophic to contemplate.
On some level, to experience life at such intensity and with such unattached, deconstructed observation, is to experience an incandescent peace, sacred, fertile, wholly joyous. This non-dual, unconditional state explains why a passer-by could well hear me chuckle with no visible cause
You are to imagine my progress on any pavement that I am aware, with a physical reverberation, that my atoms move among collections and assemblages of atoms as energetic, as complex and as screaming-beautiful as all others, mine not excepted.
My EveryNow blog developed and began in 2018 from a life-changing outburst of heart pouring and opening for me in 2013.
WWW.EVERYNOW.BLOG
In 2013 I was utterly confused. There were no old reference points. Everything was unfamiliar, new and untried.
I knew it as a strange, safe and beautiful place to be. Talk about “Lost for Words”! I couldn’t explain it. At first I could not tell anybody what was happening, for the simple reason that I could find no English vocabulary to describe it.
After weeks and months, with help from Soul friends and formal research, I sussed ‘up’ from ‘down’!
So then, what did I understand? Not a thing! I still understood nothing. Now I realise there’s nothing to understand. It’s all about being.
Understanding is simply another unnecessary step to work around.
With conscious effort, I have reintegrated into this new present time. It is continuing newness. When I am in the flux of newness unending, it’s like being aware all of the time that this present presents as unique, precious, sacred.
This all-consuming belief is strengthened every moment I glance around, take a step, hear a sound, even notice a passing thought. If you notice me smile as you go, this is what lights my smile.
You’d think these experiences of utter newness might destabilise, interfere, be bothersome. I am here to tell you it’s like being an inquisitive youngster who’s strolling through and residing in a vast fairground of wonderland.
I don’t feel special or ‘other’. I am grateful to be me, and in awe of living through the sequences of life events which whizz me around my personal pin-table.
Close friends in these last ten years, Soul friends as I call them, inspire, power and light me on this journey.
And now here I am. I’m on the way to be nowhere.
No place could seem more desirable right now than nowhere. Oh, to float, alert, connected and intimately present nowhere, EveryNow!
Clearly, while this artistic representation is bucolic whimsy, there is in truth nothing whatsoever either fanciful or unreal about it.
Ingrained in your and my Original Wild consciousness are forested places where we had to experience arduous toil, and apprehension of dangers ranging from being injured, and losing our way in the dark, to attack by strangers or wild beasts.
In these same places there thrived entire populations of those non-human companions, who lived in and shared the forest seasons with us.
These wild spirits, with whose survival our own was bound together, soon became these same tamed and familiar furry and feathery creatures that we were given to anthropomorphise for courage, for continuity of knowledge and out of a deep pagan respect for the wildness which their small warm bodies seemed to incarnate alongside our own.
The picture I look at speaks to me about the continuity of millenia of human settlement, when word of mouth kept the rise and fall of time, precious know-how was assiduously handed down from one generation to another, long before books, clocks, towns.
A friend mused, “If we can stay in the heart, I think every day would be beautiful.”
The wonderful thing is that we are there. The heart is our natural born home. It always was and will always be so. Here is where bliss is. Bliss of the most peaceful and unassuming and abundant kind.
Your heart and mine and all hearts share a portion of the love and peace from which arose all beings, animate, inanimate, sentient or not, and to which all are always returning.
If I get out from under my own feet, if I begin to truly see the laughably illusory nature of the images of the obstacles my mind chooses to scatter on my days and nights, then the trip-hazards in my personal Heads Up Display, the disparaging self-images my mind constructs, and which lie littering my way, all, all, all evaporates before my eyes.
If I learn about who I am, from others first, from serious academic study, and then by observing my own image in these reflections, I clear my unknowing, I open my mind to believe the best of myself.
It is my unknowing which invites mental constructions to explain the unknown, and so I am inclined to measure my worth by reference to explanations derived from socially accepted norms.
As I seek stability and comfort and refuge from these unknowns, I tend to label my fears as things external to my being, and not of my own making. By directing my attention on this naming, I am turning my back on the source of peace, harmony, balance, light and love. The source is in my own heart. It’s always ready to welcome me in like a faithful and passionate lover.
My heart releases an avalanche of self-esteem and self-confidence. It colours my days with my favourite colours. It shows up on demand like my bestie with a loving smile and with a gaze no vision of an angel can match
The View at 72+ 