Aloud down the green lanes

Brown Cuckoo Dove

Pick a day,
Any day
to say Yes.

Pick a time,
a time that presents,
to say Love.

Pick Love,
Pick Yes,
And say I do, I love.

Say I love long and
Aloud down the green lanes
And back again.

Chorus with the rain-gurgling earth
Shout out love

Immense love to a Brown Cuckoo Dove

How do you surf?

There is a postulated theory that Time was cognate with the Big Bang.
In this elegant supposition, time moved out from the expanding Singularity surfing the crest of the shock wave in all directions.
What we perceive as the passage of time is our conscious awareness of the continual creation of Time on its always beginning never ending way from the somewhat sudden and inexplicable inception of the Universe.
By my own calculations, today’s date was, will be, and is surfed by an inconceivably large number of planet dwellers of astonishingly varied body forms – those five-pointed star air-breathers we see in the bus, like ourselves, not excepted.
The key question is how? How do they occupy themselves as they surf it…

Choices that turn dark lives light

1508448566-picsay.jpg

https://www.wired.com/2016/08/xavi-bou-ornitographies/amp

❤ Choices ♡

Choices that turn dark lives light are so easy to make, because images of colour and lightness are everywhere you care to look in every direction every day.

I love to look out for colours that go together. Harmony is a reaching out towards a perception of balance between what moves the heart in a direction, and choosing to put into operation the gliding grace which makes that movement possible.

❤ Light or dark ♡

What is plainly open and those things that are hard to see, because they are hidden, or maybe they are covered with pain. I always have the choice what to see.

0 Emptiness or Bounty 1

I always have the choice. Some choose the mixed media of an artist, or the subtle patterns and cadences of melody. Some choose to construct with words, looks, gestures, actions.

There is joy, and such a lot of it, to be found in the infinite possibilities of colour on an empty palette, of taste in an empty cup, of response in the eye of a stranger.

The empty tree is empty until it welcomes another bird.

~ Love is the thread which weaves the empty sky with birdsong

~ Love is present EveryNow

Be the prayer the next person comes to you for

A prayer wheel is a sacred object of veneration used by generations time-out-of mind in unbroken tradition for the purpose of expressing mantras for auspicious intentions.
Mantras are written on the central ‘tree’ inside, and pilgrims will make the prayer wheel turn.
A prayer wheel can be small enough to hold in one hand, or it can be several times the scale of a person.
Venerated widely around its place of origin, or quietly kept close within the family home for generations, a prayer wheel is inscribed with sacred mantras in geometrical script.
A prayer wheel is designed to turn about its longitudinal axis. Each revolution of a prayer wheel is a devotional prayer, supplication, intention.
It can be new. Though many are known to be ancient, bearing noble accretion of patina from many millions of revolutions at the hands of pilgrims.
With their regular rhythm, our feet measure out the lives we lead. You and I, our hearts beat, and from birth till death, we breathe in and out.
We depend on one another in order to live. Our bodies must remain intact and upright in order to function as tillers and sowers, reapers of harvests. We go and make offerings. We accept offerings.
We meet each other much like pilgrims meet prayer wheels, you and I.
Our busy days revolve around our night quietudes. We wish for love, food, drink, and the plenitude of harmonies with intention and zeal sufficient to make contact with the person’s innermost sacred space – the place where life originates and is continually refreshed and replenished. That place, whose eternal flame burns bright and unwavering, consumes nothing, only exists to support the life that supports it.
This flame can also magically renew and replenish the lives of those who come close enough with humility and purity of intent.
Be the prayer the next person with palm open, outstretched, comes to you with
~ Love is present EveryNow

* In the aftermath of the Great Storm of October ’87 *

My nose will always remember it. At first light on Friday 16 October 1987, I put my head outdoors into the eerie calm.
The smell of blood was everywhere. It came from no particular direction. It was “vegetable” blood. It was the airborne scent of green sap from innumerable billions of violently ruptured branches and twigs.
I remember a ghostly instinct of fear and dismay rise up inside me. Some kind of animal anxiety was stirred in me by the combined saps of crushed plants hanging in the morning air. This smell of distress entered, bypassed reason, defied description, and reached inside to scrape equanimity out from my guts.
Every breath I breathed in was saturated with the green lamentation of wounded flora.
Decades later, the recollection of this chemical signal to which my body, not my mind, responded, reminds me of the damage organised human activities are doing to the ecology. This ecology is an intrinsic part of our human order. This is the ecology we all share and depend on for our long term well being and our continued existence.
Collectively our insensate actions are contributing causes whose effects day by day are hardly perceptible.
Our inability to come to formal agreement on collective moderating action is something I could liken to a blind hand unwittingly guiding the path of a slow but ever-growing hurricane.

Wherever this zone of destruction wanders, the juicy sap, the green lifeblood from hapless green beings ascends into its darkness, never to be seen again

“The Great Bell Chant”

“The Great Bell Chant”
“… in the garden of my heart the flowers of peace bloom beautifully…”
In my view, The Great Bell Chant is a shining example of the best fruit that the wandering Journeyer may find hanging from the low branches in the Endless Orchards of Facebook.
I am sure that I have no need to compare present bliss with past contentment or discontent.
What shook my heart nearly to pieces, or what filled it brimming full with light and peace has no meaning and no bearing on the “I” that calls me by my name with no sound.
I am certain that I am founded in love, and I am steadfast in knowing I am a delicately tuned receiver of love.
Beyond this, and before this inloving outfurling, I am in a place of great safety. I am in this sacred space of peace and love hand-in-hand with all humanity.
I pause to see, and am astonished!
I share without effort the life of every living thing with every living thing.
Oh my friends. My dear and lovely friends
❤ ❤ ❤

ROMANCE

💓 Romance 💓
most assuredly
doesn’t amount to
the totality

of

human existence.

But the areas romance does
not touch on

can safely

be dismissed

as

utterly

inconsequential
[Romance…”The art of spending an amount of time, however short, completely absorbed in the presence of another, to the exclusion of all else”]

Abject Terrors

Clearly, while this artistic representation is bucolic whimsy, there is in truth nothing whatsoever either fanciful or unreal about it.
Ingrained in our Original Wild consciousness are forested places where it was our lot to experience arduous toil, and apprehension of mortal 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 seasons of the forest 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 the increase of courage, for the continuity of precious 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 rose and set the rise and fall of time in the stars and the planets, and in human hearts long before books, clocks, towns.

Symmetries – shape, form, colour, tonality of colour, purpose and design for purpose

Symmetry in nature. Symmetry of shape, of form, of colour, of tonality of colour, symmetry of purpose and design for purpose.
Like a match head striking on a sandpaper, these light up fires inside my deepest consciousness.
What transcendent wonder! This involuntary response of mine must be my inherent symmetries resonating in recognition of the moth’s.

The astonishing light of your own being

“I wish I could show you,
when you are lonely or in darkness,
the astonishing light of your own being.”
~ Hafiz.
Perfect. True.
One of the few duties incumbent upon me as a Friend is to reflect the innate grace of my friend, so I might help sorrows to be drawn back into perspective, so dark byways can be lightened, and so Love can again be seen by the one whose hand stretched out for it once so blindly.

HORIZON BUBBLES

SOUND HORIZONS
It’s relatively easy to stop, eyes closed, and allow time for my sound-horizon to expand like a huge magic bubble, with me, ever so pleased, at its center.
It’s less easy, but still surprisingly enjoyable, to do the same, deploying my sense of smell.
Expansive sight is the hardest, because my eyes are a forward extension of my brain. And for reasons of basic survival, the brain has to keep up a distracting dialogue with the insistent voice of the ego. But expansive sight brings rewards of great riches!

“The most important people in any society are the children”

Consider: “The most important people in any society are the children”
Perhaps it is symptomatic of an underlying need for change that English Law, with its concrete heritage traceable down the centuries, continues to step over and past people and their pain, and chooses instead to make much of property, wealth and territory.
There are those who think “cats, dogs and paperclips” first, and who place children, teachers, nurses, doctors, emergency service workers and public servants, and retail shop assistants ways down on the scale of human value and respect.

Perquisite of EveryNow

Excerpt from Gary Renard, ‘Disappearance of the Universe’ the chapter titled ‘Better than Sex’ –
Then one woman had the courage to get up and ask the monks how they could go so long — in one case, thirty years — without having sex.

The monk who had been celibate the longest, and who spoke English as well as the Dalai Lama, thought for a minute and then surprised the audience with his reply:
“When you’re coming all the time, it doesn’t make any difference.”

When enough comes to a peak at sufficient, it contains the sum of all joys

In my day, when enough comes to a peak at sufficient, it contains the sum of all joy.

If I allow myself to come into close connection with some external event, it can show me clearly and directly a total, utter and complete satisfaction – “sufficiency”.

It is the presence of sufficiency which links directly to the sum of all joys.

There are treasures of astonishing variety and abundance to be found in the realisation of Sufficiency.

The lines in Genesis touch this: “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.”

If I go out and about and bring some forethought to my steps, when I encounter a delight, I need not let it enter me and then pass me by.

I may see a kindness by one road user to another, hear a birdcall, observe the scent of a flowering shrub, board the right bus at the moment I needed to travel.

I may be kissed, and as I stop taking breath, all the breaths I have ever breathed are contained in that kiss.

Any joy piercing the living moment is sufficient.

In the split second I try to explain it, repeat it, recall it or record it, it is already long gone.

The value – the treasures – to be found in any experience is in my inborn ability to allow that quality of sufficiency to overtake both it and me.

If I can only stop trying to dream, I can awake to find I am being dreamed by my dream.

Gratitude for these infinite sufficiencies!

* Years of Light and Grace *

* Years of Light and Grace *
There are places of timeless clarity, worlds of untramelled and intense unselfconscious beauty, millions and trillions of them.

They are rocky bodies, large or not large, in orbit around parent stars throughout the galaxies of Universe.

I meditate with trembling daring and respect on the myriad places hallowed by the intervention of nothing more disturbing than starlight.

To me these are a source of joy and an open channel to meditation on peace so pure, it is almost as painful as love itself

~ Love is present EveryNow

* Zilch? *

* Zilch? *
I believe the concept of “nothing” is a misconception that comes from lazy dualist attitudes. I believe we, alive and sentient, get to access a little of everything. Every one of us enters into and is entered by more or less of everything.
I say “Nothing” is a fiction, only a cynical fiction.

I could wax lyrical about everything, but there’s no need. Everything is its own best advocate.

Like a brilliant earth-grazing meteor, “everything” is uncompromisingly ready and poised to penetrate consciousness from one instant to the next.

Nothing never happens. It only fleetingly seems to “be” in the moment before “Everything” kicks off in its true incarnate form, EveryNow.

A moment’s reflection reminds me there is no before, only the moment. By the way, it’s every bit as sweet or sweeter as the cadbury’s chocolate of the same name.

If you agree with me that “nothing” can be safely set aside, then what remains? It is the ever-increasing attraction of greater or lesser degrees of sufficiency of witness.

The quality of “Everything” is safe; it’s body heat; it is peace; it’s unity; and it is quite obviously bigger on the inside than the outside.

The most exciting thing about this “Everything” thing?

“Everything” loves with indiscriminate super-abundance, and it even loves those lovable people who propose the existence of nothing.

. . . We are all “different” and some are open or not open in varying degrees. I am coming to believe it matters little what states of openness we are at. It matters more how frequently we engage curiousity and courage.
“May my mind stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple” Doing all of that obliterates cravings after concepts like Nothing. You, friend, are the Goose in the Bottle. It’s time to exit

A grace of reconciliation is touched upon directly here

One of the most speedy routes to a grace of reconciliation is touched upon directly here.
🌱🌸🌱💮🌱🏵️🌱🌺🌱

How unrelenting is the pain of unresolved love?

How confusing the search for the heart of a lover?

How to keep from tumbling into uncharted emotional waters when our affections are drawn headlong towards another?

The need for certainty in the intentions of the loved person can begin as a rosebud, but it can rapidly grow up on so many different possible pathways that we see only thickets of confusion and painful thorns.
There are, I believe, only a small number of heart to heart meetings which thrive and continue in parallel harmony.
At the first signals of reciprocated affection, the mind leaps to take control of the aroused beating heart.
The mind assigns to the person who has come to the foreground of the heart’s attention a variety of labels, all of them inappropriate and irrelevant.
The person is the object of affection, the person must be targeted as if there is an immediate risk of loss.
The multicoloured spectrum of desires and aspirations, incubated for perhaps years in the closed sanctuary of the heart’s tranquil solitude, are placed like diadem and crowns – for want of any immediate proof to the contrary – like royal clothes, jewels and heavenly anointing perfumes on the shoulders of this beloved person who has appeared in our life.
If I have made peace with my heart, if my first best friend is my heart, I will be taken by surprise, interested, even amused at the way my mind tumbles over itself to take me over and attempts to lead me on this dizzying helter-skelter journey.
But after my awareness of the mind’s antics passes, it’s time to allow my heart to sing its powerful melodies and to fly on its own terms, not outwards in the direction of the other person, but inwards.
Inwards the unchained heart, glowing with love and gratitude, can be freed to soften the cravings of the soul for recognition and for celebration of its purity.

No soul needs to possess another. All souls with no exception are pure. They require a particular essence of peace in which to celebrate their natural joys, their gifts of purity. One soul seen in the mirror of another magnifies and glorifies both!

At last, the heart may trust it will find a mirror where a few of its own qualities, not all, may be reflected in some of the qualities of the heart of another.
~ ~ Love is present EveryNow