Category: Written journal

The Acceptor

The Acceptor

There is a pressure from within to be creative. Our human creative impulse is sacred and precious, and it springs eternal from within us all.

I tend to measure the extent of my wellbeing by how much room and time I devote to any creative thought, impulse or activity.

I brindle and bristle loudly at the mention of things inside feeling as if they are not right during blank or uncreative episodes. I would get even more agitated, if these periods of no creativity are called out as not good.

The leafless “lifeless” trees in winter engage in new life-giving creativity through a symbiosis of biochemical fungal activity deep in their earth-bound roots.

In recent years, the intense all pervading peace I have found through conscious cultivation of acceptance during the seemingly dead zones of my weeks and days has taught me to be the Acceptor.

I can accept harmony and balance continue growing wholesome and undamaged even though I may not be able to visit or view or creatively engage with them, when my heart seems cloaked off in those null, dull, dark times.

I am not unlike a living rooted plant. I must gratefully accept as gifts the fluctuations in the circumstances and the environment that is mine. Like a plant, I accept that certain elements like harmony and balance may play out on such large time-scales that I may not get so much as a reassuring glimpse of them in my daily life.

I do know my whole being is well-taken care of by mysterious forces of Lunar wellness and Solar goodness. I do know I am massively grateful to have occasional glimpses by the Ah! of simple hindsight into those mysterious and ever-present flows of life-giving strength which the Sun and Moon fill me with.

Summer and winter

Come and go

See the sense of season

Sleep naked of reason

Love is present EveryNow

In a distant galaxy

In a galaxy a long way away, I found a Palace. It was made during millions of years of evolution, and its existence was the urge to grow.

It grew away from the centre of its planet, and was admired by all who had ganglions to admire with.

The empty Palace requires a visitor, for with no witnesses, the structure exists inchoate, incomplete. With or without a witness, it crumples and melts down into the loam of its origin anyway.

It has constructed itself to be an object of desire to beings with legs or wings.

In their absence, it relies on its trillion brethren to display its message and with it to fill every space between fire and ice.

Long ago, it took the form that love takes whenever love has the opportunity to dance with atoms.

Therefore it has no need to say, “Love”.

~ ♡ 🌟 ♡ ~

[This report from an interstellar explorer was rebroadcast to its galaxy far far away, in the hope that the Palaces of Earthly Love may come to be recognised, venerated and given the status of Universal Stellar Protection by all star-system populations for all time]

AUTHOR’S FOOTNOTE

I took a photo of an unusually coloured striated garden poppy. Later that day, I enhanced it slightly, to post it on Facebook, and then the line came, “In a galaxy a long way away”.

The combined factors involved in the arrival on Earth of such a complex botanical structure are all but impossible comprehend.

My whole life I have struggled to find out how mathematics, geometry, cellular biology, phytochemistry and evolutionary botany, could affect an organism whose purpose of existence is single-pointed, and whose outward form is graceful, coherent simplicity.

A most effective and dramatic perspective I have been using for years is to pretend I have stepped off a Flying Saucer and am taking stock of an endless variety of never-seen, never-imagined Earthly life forms.

What happens when I, a creature from another solar sytem, am walking in a land of non-stop discovery?

In a flash, my perspective broadens by astronomical leaps. I am one being in a Cosmos of beings, all completely different, yet all sharing life.

My restless questions about origins, about shape, form and composition fade into a lower state of urgency. What matters is the universality of life.

My garden poppy is a messenger of life, and the astonishment is clear. Poppy exists throughout the millenia.

The manner of life’s self-assembly, of life’s urge to exist, endure, and replicate have come to me in this one flower – just for me and only at this point in time – via the operation of whole epochs of confusion, destruction and rebirth.

I have no reason to be shy to say this. It represents the result of massive recurring surges of the pure powers of love on our planet.

There is something inexplicable and unfindable in the startling grace displayed in this poppy. The grace does not require analysis or research. It simply asks of me to release all question, and to accept with childlike wonder the blindingly brilliant fact of its existence, here and now, with me

My flame survives the silent violence of my storm

I’m a flame that survives the silent violence of my storm.
Artwork by @gavadana

I am a thriving flame that survives the silent violence of my storm.

Awareness and acknowledgement all the time of the stark fact of impermanence is central to maintaining my healthy lifestyle. 

The more I allow myself to live in transience, the more grounded I am. The more grounded, the more I’m content and at peace.

Peace of mind is the starting point for all the honeyed delights of communal sharing.

Simply because we might never see each other again, all whom I meet are lit up brilliantly by the shining peace in the heart of this moment together!

Celebrate! We, you, I, like the very ground beneath our bodies, are made of impermanence.

Happy EveryNow

~ Love is present EveryNow

Diamond!

Hengistbury Head in spring

At an elevation of 30 metres, my heart looks out towards the sea.

It is the English Channel. It is home to fish I cannot see, crustaceans, microorganisms. Their hearts are beating at depths I cannot see.

I am aware of the entire planet, the continuation to where I cannot see, over the horizon. More sea, more living heart beating life forms. And they are all in one vast interconnected body of salt water called seas and oceans covering the planet.

I turn round to face away from this extravagance of elemental water. I look instead to where my home is, the homes of my friends, family, those I think of as individuals who form part of the crowds of people.

As I live and breathe, the living breathing lives of land, sea and air breathe with me and to me.

Sleepy heads are hidden under feathered wings, cold-blooded vertebrates that do float, insects numbersome as the stars in the crevices of the sky.

All and each are trending small lives of supreme value.

The trillion facets of the diamond of life!

Outside inside

My outside is my inside playground

The inside is the outside.
The outside is the inside.
In darkest night,
nothing changes from the
inside to the outside.

The sun rises over me.

In the light I see the outside
as identical to the inside.
Glory, huge hugging glory,
expands and I know
the inside is bigger than the outside

…..÷…..

I have been shaken to my depths since the war began in Ukraine. I have been trying to rebalance, to rediscover my equanimity. Why do I feel the pain so of these sufferers? Where is safety now? What is lit now on my path, where I used to need nothing to light my way?

It is hard work this cleaning of the heart’s wounds. It is good to light one by one the guttering candles on my way, my patient way to remember. My heart waits for me in the Middle Way. I know exactly where to look

🟡🔎Solar burn🔍🟡

Posto 10, Ipanema

I packed a few pine tree wood discs, sandpapered for this trip, along with my lenses.

I choose a quiet spot to set up ‘shop’ on Ipanema beach. I seat myself on my folding camp stool on the sand with my back turned three-quarters to the Sun. Polished wood in my left hand, a smallish lens in my right.

Now I have arrived. I’m in shorts, peaked cap on my head. I’m wearing glasses that protect me from 85 per cent of sunlight and from all harmful rays.

I am here at one of the most famous beauty spots on the planet. After the relative greyness of Northern Europe, I should be hyper aware of the privilege of being on Ipanema Beach. Normally my senses would be opened and scanning. I’d be drinking, seeing, hearing and loving these moments in paradise on earth.

As always, the meditative buzz of Solar Pyrography welcomes me. Soon my breathing slows, my mind empties, and what I am doing takes all of my focus. Smoke and occasionally sweet resin-scented flames rise from my wood disc, as if from a sacrificial offering.

When people see me, they nudge each other, pause and say, “Look what that man’s doing!” It’s easy to leave them on the edge of my vision.

The kids are not so shy. They barge in close. Thankfully they accept me with my monosyllabic noises. Some notice their shadows block my work. My lens moves on. Who will go home and try for themselves this trick of fire with a lens and sunlight? I am always amazed that Solar Burning is such an unknown activity in hot countries.

The Rio sun hurts. I’m in a race to finish my commission before the thirst and the pain drive me away. I’m not sunning myself, swimming, surfing, strolling along admiring the sea, the surf or the mountains. I am not drinking Brahma beer or ice-cold fresh juice from coconut stalls.

I am here, but I am not here! I am in an altogether other place.

It is as heavenly as this fabulous Brazilian holiday destination. This heavenly place is entirely contained inside of me by the precisely controlled actions of my body as I focus Sun energy through a glass onto pine wood

The engaged couple’s initials, B and D, woven into a heart made of hearts above the Lover’s Knot, looks ready to me. I hope they like it back home in Dorset.

👣 Misty origins of EveryNow 🫂

💜 Do you speak Heart? 🧡

A portal to life’s glory opened and engulfed me in 2013. I journaled to bring order into the unfolding inexplicable goodness. At first I lacked even the words in English.

My intense daily journaling and my high intensity search for the meaning of this new condition of heightened awareness morphed into this blog:
http://www.everynow.blog

In my EveryNow blog, I write everyday stories of love, compassion and praise for the glories of living from the heart.

During the five or six decades of my life prior to 2013, I had contented myself with “Living to Love”, which is pretty, beautiful even, but superficial.

As my heart awakes from a long slumber in hiding, it greets me, and here is where “Loving to Live” begins!

Today I am at peace and at ease with my experience of being alive in this completeness of sentience, though it still feels as surprising and as brand new as it did at its inception.

Much of what I have become aware of as I negotiate these orchards of newness, is well described in the book I recently discovered, much to my surprise, by Raymond Carl Sigrist called “In love with everything – Apophatic Mysticism”. It’s published by Infinity.com

The most effective way to write about the constantly exploding sensations of this post-traumatic Heavenly Bliss event is to connect to its source  — the heart.

Forty or fifty years of verbal doldrums, when I neglected to hold communion with my heart, have left me, even after these last nine years, in a place where I have to learn to speak from and to my heart in baby steps.

I have to learn how to speak the language of heart. This will take up all my remaining years. It is the sweetest of all possible challenges!

I love to remind myself ~

~ Love is present EveryNow

🗿 The Stones of Avebury 🗿

The blood and the sweat of ancestors

so it begins again)

These massive immobile megaliths are stuck in mud, aloofly impervious to the floating breeze.

Stones, weather worn stones, high and broad, sit. They are noble solid refuges favoured by lichen.

Blessed in circular disposition with the blood and the sweat of ancestors all without age or name, the stones by size and by circle attract to themselves involuntary interpreters.

The great stones one by one call in to themselves the visiting poet, the enlightened woman or man.

Today’s people, acolytes in all but title, journey here, guided by heart-wonder, turn shining eyes on the softly present rocky surfaces.

Obedient to the allure of the Circle of Stones, the people who have eyes to see they stand close, they face the impermeable sacred verticals.

Today’s descendant ascendant people, new of flesh, bear the swarm mind imprint of the priests of old. This is why we are with the circles. This is what is embraced by ancient rock.

A hard touchable magic spell as simple as a smile breathed, releases bonds of solidity.

The long dead keepers of the astrogeometric arts pass to us their passion inside of the secret, solid and holy lightlessness.

(All that we can remember, we to whom these glorious revelations are granted, after we come away so very changed, is that we always forget,

Only by letting go

Arrive and go

A friend said to me… “Only by letting go of your past self can you take yourself to unimagined places.”

I cannot let go of my entire self with all of my past thoughts, words and deeds, when I hurt so much from their heavy weight on my back.

There’s much more to the action of letting go than an effort of will.

Massive changes can take place when my heart reveals itself and I take notice of its childlike purity, and I act to navigate the grand tides of new understanding my own heart offers to me.

These changes present my mind with a view of my original innocence. They begin when I listen to the positive appreciative comments from my family and friends, and I make the effort to believe what I hear.

What have I done up till now to prevent myself from believing in my goodness? And why do I turn a deaf ear to compliments and a blind eye to the anxiety in my face in the mirror which asks only to be loved?

There are answers to be found by examination of the causes of fear that I cling to. Among other places, answers in past trauma revisited, and in timid acceptance of outside pressures from social conditioning.

What naturally follows little by little is my understanding of my entirely needless attachment to my fear and self-loathing that spring from shame and my guilt about former deeds, words and thoughts engaged in out of ignorance of my true value to myself and others.

I begin to make closures for years of misdirected and wasted effort to merely content myself with survival, by forgiveness through self love and self validation.

I forgive my younger self for what I did out of ignorance fuelled by self doubt while wading along underlying streams of fear.

In this new condition of redemption for my past behaviours I can be freed of past guilt and shame, forgive, love, and let go of my past self and take myself to previously unimagined places illuminated by the peace and love from which all beings arise and to which we are all walking each other home 💫

‘Ø’ NOTHING EXCLUDES ANYTHING ‘∞’

Discrete entity

‘Ø’ NOTHING EXCLUDES ANYTHING ‘∞’

Discrete entities, ideas, constructs are never separate, they are part of all other such ‘manifestations’.

Seeming to be singular at first, all things display a self-similarity on a simple level. They are included in the same ‘set’ of inclusivity in their totality.

More than that, all things are subtly interleaved, because all causes affect. That which is affected [by the existence of another] cannot have its origin traced, because its antecedents go back to the ‘beginning of time’ itself.

The futility of trying to ‘know’ what a singular thing ‘is’ directs me, like a prisoner is directed towards freedom, to salute the unending riches in not knowing.

The tiny wisdom of accepting not knowing is bigger than a mountain of pure gold.

Nothing excludes anything.

One of the certainties on which I can build my life is that my body, mind, heart and soul are included in the universe.

At times I might veer off and begin to wonder if Life is This or That.

Then I remember that neither one thing nor the other came first.

My consciousness arises from both.

In the moment I exist, I am both alive and an ineffable part of life. I am both alive and I am being lived by life.

Who cannot be brimming with excitement at the unfolding potential of discovery ?

This excitement is endless in the way of fractal endlessness. It is the acknowledgement of, and the gratitude for the enjoyment of this very endlessness which is both entirely sufficient and delightfully finite in the embodiment of its expression in me. This is one of the things which give rise to the chuckle of the enlightened.

I am as appreciative of this as it is humanly within my power. And I try to act accordingly.

Passionately therefore, I say I should act with compassion and respect, for the valid reason that my thoughts, my words and my deeds contain all the force of the flap of the beat of that proverbial butterfly wing

~ Love is present EveryNow

Thoughts arising…

… … …The appreciation of the pure and mathematical fundamental principles which underlie the way living beings assume their form and ‘operate’ is one essential bridge towards a deeper understanding of my place in this experience of being alive.

At times I might veer off and begin to wonder if Life is Math. Then I remember that neither one thing nor the other came first. My consciousness arises from both.

In the moment I exist, I am both alive and an ineffable part of life. I am both alive and I am being lived by life.

Who can retain their passionate overflood at the unfolding potential of discovery ? This excitement is endless in the way of fractal endlessness. It is the acknowledgement of, and the gratitude for the enjoyment of this very endlessness which is both entirely sufficient and delightfully finite. Is this what gives rise to the chuckle of the enlightened?

The Accretion of Time; the hallmark of the Gentleness of Being

“So perfect, it looks like a painting.”

Where perfection is in play, encountered, and witnessed, it becomes a springboard.

Perfection, when noticed, becomes a jumping off point like a springboard for an immediate journey of travel. This journey takes us spontaneously both upwards, outwards and downwards, inwards.

In the presence of such qualities of perfection we can connect with the innate beauty of ourselves. I see that we who walk, talk and play are the product of aeons of natural selection and myriad cycles of survival and regeneration.

The way of the oyster allows time to pass, nacreous secretion to form, and a harmless pearl of great value to form. All living things, sentient or not, have arrived at material form through a similar, sacred, delicate process.

The Accretion of Time is the hallmark of the Gentleness of Being.

The most memorable photos, poems, paintings, sculptures, musical compositions are ones which make this unique appeal to our core original being  —  our sense of our own connection to the timelessness of our innate beauty.

When beauty, as seen in this seascape for example, triggers our response, it sidelines our notion of who we are and it reaches straight into what we are. This is an awareness of the Gentleness of Being fashioned naturally over periods of time too huge to comprehend.

Our human time frame may be overwhelmed when we are moved by art and real life entering our awareness, to the extent that our regular analytical faculties falter and blur out.

~ Love is present EveryNow

Orion

Rigel, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix and Saiph — form the intriguing shape of Orion the rectangular.

Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka — Orion’s Belt.

I stood and saw Orion before bedtime.

Saiph engages me in sweet stellar sign language.

My brain is beaming bounty back to Betelgeuse.

My body bellows out to Bellatrix.

Alnilam and Alnitak activate my cosmic genes.

Mintaka draws my gaze.

I salute Mintaka who blesses me, my forefathers, and the flowing whitewaters of my descendents.

I raise my eyes to Rigel and I receive the Promissory of EveryNow

frustration📌pain anger😡hatred

contentment🕊️
compassion🤗
love❤️
joy😊


Back in the 1980’s I was trapped, caught between a rock and a hard place. My head began to fill with frustration, pain, anger, bitterness, even hatred.

The key to regaining peace of mind came from studying (with my soulmate) the book by Norman Vincent Peale, published in 1952, “The Power of Positive Thinking”. In these pages, I learned lessons invaluable for a more productive daily life with the strength of faith and peace to sustain me.

I acquired the techniques of conscious choice to reject negative modes of thinking and replace them with positive thoughts, and embrace these new ways with alacrity and gratitude.

I acquired the almost magical ability to abandon unproductive habits and replace them with new constructive ways of coping. I doubt even Luke Skywalker possessed such effective tools!

I understood how to create an image of my future productive and happy self, so I could stop wasting my energy on merely being anxious about my need to gear up to change.

In these ways, I quit smoking after 33 years. I retrained to change my career not once, but several times. I began to work on being more non-judgemental, which meant that I could better tolerate and accept without murmur negativity from others in my workplace.

And I welcomed relief into my life when I quit my pointless running on the hamster wheel of hatred.

From the beginning, I recognised the future and the past are devoid of meaning and reality, because all goals, mine and as well as yours, are achievable by a steady focus on the core strengths freely available in massive unending abundance that come from loving to live in the moment.

For the life-affirming gifts I carry in my heart and mind today, after I left behind those days of darkness and fear on the treadmill of addiction to sorrow and self-pity, I am humbly grateful.

Namasté all dear Friends

~ Love’s presence  E v e r yN o w

May you awake to believe you dreamed you were alive

Awake to believe

May you awake to believe you dreamed you were alive and truly know you are

We all come towards awareness of the Being nature of existence from such a huge variety of diverse start points.

Yours is from turning this wood into this instrument of music. Mine is from visualising on blank paper the flow of words from an unseen spring.

The common factor is in the way we ourselves, who are each our own anthropomorphs, are willing to be transformed during the entry into us of these Awarenesses.

Awarenesses they seed in us, and we can begin to observe their inception, their progression into places in us for which we have no precise definition.

And we suffer, are broken open, melted down, and recrystallised in the gradual timeline of the birth pains of every Awareness.

And then comes the dawning of the joys.

The joys, like the risen Sun above the Arctic Circle, the joys will not set any more, as it becomes apparent that there is no boundary and no distinction between ourselves as witnesses of the Being of existence and our lives in the alive living of it.

•❀Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ❀•

May your best dreams be rooted in earth, may they network with the sky.

May you awake to believe you dreamed you were alive and truly know you are

May you live as a dream exists – full of form, light, wonder.

~ Love is present E v e r yN o w

¦>At the threshold<¦

¦> At the threshold remember <¦

Every day, many times a day, I stand at the doorway about to close the door. 
In the room is my spouse, my child, friend, acquaintance, friend of a friend. 

It is perfectly possible that this will be the last moment we will be in sight and in earshot of one another, because the life we breathe in and the life our heart beats out like a clock of blood is fragile beyond our understanding.

What words of love, what signs of friendship, what commentary of appreciation can I leave behind me as I close that door?

Every time you take your leave of your nearest, your dearest, remember! 

Remember to bless the moment of parting with a token of your love

Self-love quenches fear

Time spent in little things

{Now – (Past + Future)} = Infinity in Zero


When I don’t allow myself to accept my circumstances, conflict begins.

I put it to you, I have no need to experience frustration as long as my consciencious attention is fiercely focused towards observation of the fruits of the moment, with every one of my senses awake, tuned, alert, receptive.

There is nothing specifically prescribed to concentrate on. After all, where my body is located, it is surrounded by sights, textures, sounds, scents – an unending procession of the external stimuli of Realia!

I, or you, can engage in this close focusing now and then, if we like.

However, when I choose repeatedly to take the time to plunge myself into immersion of the sensory moment, then from out of this microcosm, I may be blessed to receive radical life-enhancements with the power to permanently change the way I perceive the quality of my life.

These are the slow-maturing fruits of microcosmic inspection. The sweetness they bring is so sublime, I overflow with joy and I simply have to share!

I know from my own experience there is an uncomplicated way to release joy and open the floodgates to love and peace, when I recognise that my mental images of the past and the future are illusions.

The distractions of frustration, fear and anger live in the unreal past and the impossible future. These products of misdirected attention are irrelevant and wholly superfluous to human requirements!

What validates this leap into a blissful state, where rushes of love chase away every last residue of fear?

Well, for a start, being intensely nose-to-nose with the absence of time in the flying moment is thunderingly awesome.

Here are the pleasures of non-attachment, where I cultivate my close attention, and it returns intensity of awareness back to me without locking any part of me into what I am doing with my directed attention.

Explanations about the pleasure of being released from the past and the future is not the thing. The thing is to be thankful.

Gratitude is the right reaction. Be grateful for release into lightness of heart. Be thankful for sudden intimacy with the giant world of intuition. Be in awe of the strange new ability to read hearts.

Flow in the moment helps self realisation.

In the moment when a fragment of birdsong triggers my smile, it triggers also my self love. The union of self with self is union with the whole of existence. What other respectful ways of being glad are there than the gladness of humility, awe and gratitude?

~ Love is present EveryNow

Wholeness

Hug virtue

Give the whole world a Hug


Hug the world out loud

Give the world a silent hug

Hug it in your work and play

Feel the wholeness hug you back

~ Love is present EveryNow

Time welcomes patient travellers

Not so

🌹Be patient with yourself.

Unlike the gangsters slugging it out in the movies, once knocked down, we don’t rise to fight on immediately.

We take all the time we need to heal and be healed.

Buy a single cut flower.

Sit at table with it.

Stare at it.

Stare at it, till at length it pipes up and says something back at you.

No joke, it surely will.

Roses smell of no adrenalin🌹

~ Love’s presence EveryNow

B O R E D O M

Beneath the cloak

Boredom stems from ignorance of, or more kindly put, from a lack of attention to the expressions of bliss in material form continually manifest at my fingers’ reach, before my very eyes and all around me.

If I am travelling at night, I might suffer from the delusion that darkness contains nothing of worth, and so I do whatever I can to accelerate my removal from an experience I tell myself I don’t like.

What I am failing to do is look up and see the briliance of stars. I am failing to halt my footfall to listen to the awe of silence. I am failing to bring to mind the stories of those lives who dwell in the nocturnal.

Boredom is a cloak whose unwelcome weight, when its onset is detected, stimulates a search for what my senses can detect that fill me with wonder, awe and the very delicious delights of discovery.

Truth: I cannot recall the last time I was bored

~ Love is present EveryNow