Who am I?
Miraculously, out of non-existence I am born.
Into the selfsame miraculous non-existence I am to return.
I am in a womb suspended between my two non-existences.
EveryNow sways and rocks me with tender reasurance every moment night and day.
Virtually undifferentiated from the continuum, except for the mystery of life, “I Am Love”
~ Love is present EveryNow ~
Where I cultivate my close attention, and it returns intensity of awareness to me without locking any part of me into what I am doing with my directed attention.
Counterintuitively, doing nothing all summer long wasn’t so frustrating as you might imagine.
When I wish for something other than the status quo, when I don’t allow myself to accept my circumstances, the conflict of frustration begins.
I arrived home from my operation dog tired. All physical exertion caused unpleasant dramatic effects. So exercise was obviously something to avoid.
With that, fatigue held me back. Fatigue was more of a welcome than a hindrance, because I wanted to rest, to sleep. My sleeps so refreshed me, I kind of looked forward to being tired. This became a self-sustaining cycle of pleasant reward for giving in to sleep.
Everyone agreed it had been a good summer!
My daytime luxury was to sit in the sun in the garden for long periods of time. I’d photograph insects and flowers, snooze. And then photograph flowers and insects.
Knowing that I was limited to these activities, grateful I have no need of employment, and with no other obligations, these few things quickly became what I owned.
I strongly suspect there is no need for anyone to experience frustration as long as their consciencious attention is directed towards observation of the fruits of the moment.
I learned to work on this internal reward system when I was still an employee at work, most often performing to others’ orders at others’ set times of day.
The moment of my activity becomes the world of my engagement and so it becomes my engagement with the whole world.
With the most repetetive boring work tasks, I set myself miniature milestones to achieve. That way I competed for efficiency with only myself. Only I and nobody else rewarded me for reaching my own set targets as I worked through my day.
I had no need to compete with others at work. The fact was I had no time to look over my shoulder, while I was so absorbed in my keeping up with my personal best.
These principles applied to filling sacks with builder’s rubble, as much as to achieving sales targets.
This state of mind can come from fiercely focusing on what my mind is making of where my body is, with every one of my senses awake, tuned, alert and receptive.
There is nothing special or 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, or any one can engage in doing this close focusing from time to time, if we like.
Radical life-enhancements that can permanently change the way I perceive the quality of my life derive from this style of applied attention when I choose to take the time to plunge myself into and practise immersion in the sensory of the moment, either by choice, or because some life event, such as illness or injury brings these choices front and centre.
In my EveryNow blog posts, I try to write about these fruits of microcosmic inspection. My motive is simply to share the joy and the sweetness they bring.
I know from my own experience, there is an uncomplicated way to release joy and open floodgates of love and peace, when I can recognise the distractions of frustration, fear and anger as illusory, irrelevant and wholly superfluous to human requirements!
What validates this leap into a blissful state, where fear has no existence and rushes of love flit and flutter about with me on stage in the moment? Well, for a start, being intensely nose-to-nose with the absence of time in the flying moment is thunderingly awesome.
Here we have the pleasures of non-attachment, where I cultivate my close attention, and it returns intensity of awareness to me without locking any part of me into what I am doing with my directed attention.
The pleasure of being released from the leg-irons of the Past, and the cheeky cheery turning of my back on the caverns of Future is hardly worth bothering to explain.
And explaining 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 world of intuition.
Accept and thank my lucky stars for the oddness of being able to read hearts!
Flow in the moment helps self examination. 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 gladnesses of humility, awe and gratitude?
~ Love is present EveryNow
🦋
Mine eyes take in the gifted moment
🥀
What next I chose to do is vital…
If I junk that moment,
it will have sunk without meaning,
under a million new moments,
only one moment later,
because
Love is present E v e r yN o w
I am tempted to step forward with a ghastly admission. All my life I have addressed my Intuition for guidance, understanding and comfort. The conversation is intense, fairly constant and rather lonesome. The vocabulary and range of expression increase slowly with advancing years.
When I overhear an argument where the discussion concerns the validity of abstract and unproven concepts at the heart of the “eternal” questions about Life, the Universe and Everything, and where the protagonists appear to be acquisitive in their quest for knowledge, my intuition shouts and shakes me to identify the simplest common factor, or the least complex set of sentences with the fewest sub-clauses or dependent clauses.
My Intuition seeks out the closest thing to a smell of the axiomatic, the first most viscerally appealing positive statement, and my Intuition homes in on the mystical, the emotive, and the form of expression most swiftly sensitising and arousing the poetic in me.
For “in me”, read “in my Heart”. For “Heart” read “the Peace and Love from which we all come and are constituted and to which we all return”.
All we have is the utmost we can offer using the entire range of our intellectual abilities allied to those of the past giants on whose broad shoulders we are conscious of standing and reaching up from.
We ultimately arrive at a position from which we can and really ought to say, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of Humility. Humility is endless.” (TS Eliot)
I seek my truth in deliberate isolation from the forces of competing theories. I recognise that this can be legitimately regarded as wilful intellectual laziness. It is a form of puerile anti-authoritarian rebellion. It is ghastly to admit. Yet my thirst for discovering who and what I am has, for all these years, been slaked by my strong allegiance to that intangible, real, yet immaterial moonbeam, Intuition.
The lived experience cannot be replicated by learning from others, by reading or by watching films of their experiences. The lived experience is the exotic tropical flower that draws me in. I may need to feed my courage by locking curiosity inside and allowing it to bounce around my skull until my courage gets the better of me and I “just do it”. When I jump in with both feet into a new experience, I awaken myself to it like a wonder-struck explorer.
Received knowledge of truth evaporates. Lived truth becomes the bones and blood of what I am. Lived truth constitutes my heart, my soul and my being forever and ever! This is what happened in February 2013, when I sensed that I was crossing over from a closed life to an open life. At that crossroads, the path I took led me from my old “living to love” into “loving to live”. I was changed for good. I never looked back!
I do not regard it as a conclusion at all, but as a set of tools by which to measure my days, travel time, and reflect on my life among other lives in an inevitable plurality of beings, all of whom deserve respect for being each their own ambassador of life’s abundance
There never will be for us, in these our human frames of reference, a completion, a knowledge, whose purity contains no further questions. I have found an entirely satisfactory conclusion. By this I mean it is one which satisfies my deepest need to identify with a balance between my Awareness as a sentient being, and Sufficiency of purpose in mind and body.
~ Love is present E v e r yN o w
A fondness of chickens 🐔
I spent several weeks in a far country in high summer living a couple of hundred metres from a fair sized chicken coop.
The sounds that rose and drifted in the dry air from the community of hens instilled in me a lifelong fondness for these birds.
In the midday summer heat, I’d watch them in the shade of their raised hen house.
They’d stand around, wings raised, letting the air into their armpits.
Their mild mannered, tolerant, sisterly and peaceable interractions moved me.
They’d scratch at the ground with evident curiosity, and unending hope.
I wondered at the reassurance and companionship which their casual clucking utterances might contain.
I loved their quiet untroubled noisiness over the heat haze of one young teenage summer
IMAGE Sunkenkirk in Cumbria. Gratitude to @EdwardFoster, artist, musician, poet for his gift of seeing in one of his favourite places.
… Once, a very long time ago, they came, the people, full of murmers, and on foot, to stop and understand under the new overlooking stones.
They arrived to understand how these sentinal stones circled them without circling. They understood what it was to be moved without the stones themselves stirring at all, at all. It was truly, truly it was, the new normal.
Then the word like seedcorn was spread far and wide. They began to arrive in this place with the new word.
They came many times, many people from wide and far. Along their hill tracks and through their wooded places. Down the generations they travelled. In the season they walked, to find uplift in the new normal.
Listen to the men talking low. Hear the women urging their children to quieten.
Great crowds in their seasons. Fires and Feastings. Music making and Solemnities.
Year after year, harvest upon harvest.
Oh, they murmured, those crowds, flowing like the sea at peace with itself.
They played simple music, like the sounds of the open-eyed laughter of new lovers.
They took themselves away and back again!
Later, time out of mind, on the grassy wooded pathways between the holding on and the letting go of memories, the youngest forgot what the oldest had spoken. So they turned and learned instead the word from the stones. The same sentinel stones.
The dancings and the silences of the stones, in a circle all around.
Every single one of those who had walked, who came and went, now are melted, gently melted under the forgiving ground.
Look. The stones are here now. Yes, in their sacred uprightness. Yes, so clear.
Stand. Listen as the stones gravely intone the awe of the worshippers. Crowds and crowds who are lying today deep in earth, far and wide, scattered and blind and deaf and dumb.
They truly are mighty, these populations under the ground, over which the silent stones are standing still, spreading their power over them all. And spreading their power over me, as I stand and stand and listen today!
~~ ~—~ ~~
~20161117 The peoples of the so-called past, of the Renaissance, of the Middle Ages, the Ptolomeic, the Uyghur Khaganate, those men and women of the Indus Valley Civilization, the Jomon period generations and all of our earlier and earliest forebears, elsewhere and everywhere, including especially inhabitants during those eras named with arrogant paradox as “before history”… Not one of them is “other”.
Not one is other, nor different. And not a single one but hasn’t my heart, my soul, my spirit now and at this time of my saying-tongue and of my writing-finger.
They are the bringers of my DNA. They said the sayings I say. I can see them, hear them, yes and converse with them, any and all of them, because they are my mother father sister brother from inception directly to my now-incadescent brain!
They are dead, but they are me in myriad form. They give, take, sing, wail, swallow, bleed, sweat, spit with me!
Their time of birth is my time of birth. We share all we are and all we any of us ever have in common.
Time, their time, my time, and yours too, does not exist. Simply put, when I drop my the guardianship of my ego, I can openly accept the origin of my sentient humanity as Swarm, as Collective.
There’s always plenty of time to waste or to cling to.
But stay a most precious while among the Circlestones. The Avebury, The Callanish, the great Henges, the Sunkenkirks. Hear and converse with our brethren as easily as you would to your friend
~ Love is present EveryNow
IMAGE Sunkenkirk in Cumbria. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swinside#Location
↗️ Vertigo 🔄
Here I am, I’m staring along an evolutionary track that’s many multiples of the human story.
Naked truth here is unconcealed from my eyes.
Still I have a hard time comprehending the significance of these images of resilience and perfection of form and purpose of flora and fauna in harmony and synchrony.
I find it simpler to say
~ Love is present EveryNow
The voice within has always spoken to myself and to the world from the seat of my emotions, from my feelings and impressions. I know I have always interpreted the world through my imaginative powers of association.
I’d often let this fine-tuned imagination galop away with the banalities of the day before I can get a practical handle on them.
This often led me to mis-associate external realities on purpose in order to amuse myself with impossible nonsense, or to escape more deeply away from their ordinary reality.
For a long time I’d deliberately share my own whisked-up version of things, knowing that people would be put off trying to understand me. This was how I would creep deeper into a social isolation where I felt safe. Those were the days people would hear me, tell me, “You’re mad”, turn round and walk away.
All these things became clear for me to see from the persistent hard Work of self-examination and revelation through Shamanic Healing between 2014 and 2017.
I owe an immense debt of gratitude to this compassionate soul, friend and Shamanic Healer, Tiffany Guild of Bournemouth.
I lived a rich inner life. It was both a blessing and a curse. It had originated from my isolation, starting from my earliest months of life, when trauma was the rule.
For decades, I stored in my mind humanist and “Zen” insights from inside my reinforced defended “cockpit”. I so needed to understand and be like others. But from behind my defensive walls, it was impossible. I had no visualisation of my own heavy fortifications, so I did not know how to act with the unselfconscious free flow I saw in the language and comportement of everybody else around me.
Then came 2013. The “Year of my Life”. The year I started regular Biodanza. As a result of giving away my heart, my heart appeared to me!
All the knowledge I’d stored away suddenly began to self-organise. It all began to make sense, but in a way that took a huge amount of energy to comprehend. After all, I had a library of facts and no methods of matching the facts against my new reality!
This marked my re-entry into Loving to Live. Living to love – so superficial – didn’t cut it for me any more.
It was a nose-dive into inner space. It was a scary Roller Coaster ride. It felt as if I would lose my mind, unless I could monitor this Brave New World by writing a daily Journal.
It is still a Roller Coaster ride, but it holds no fears. The intensity is undimmed. It presents with the same newness, whichever way I turn!
When I engage with my few closest friends, this dissolved barrier allows the love in their hearts to flood mine,
The more I engage with people, trees, flowers, insects in non-attached, non-judgemental ways, the less of a barrier exists between me and the “world”.
yours included
~ Love’s presence EveryNow
On being a Yes with life
Few mentions there are on Facebook or elsewhere of the “Power of Yes”.
“Yes” is the simplest of words. All the world over, we are one with “Yes” from babyhood on.
I have been making a Yes Pact with life as I live it all the time from way back as long as I can remember.
“Yes” is simply my force for change, for my reconstructed inspiration and the colour of my confidence.
Peace makes a natural ally with yes on the inside. The conditions are then fine-tuned for boundless joy to spring into existence on the outside.
That’s why the Smile of Yes has universal appeal.
I place my fingertips on my heart centre, and smile to my heart. That smile is what the heart recognises instantly. All obstacles bar none melt away in the face of that smile!
“Yes” taps directly into my pool of peace. From this wellspring I draw refreshment for awakened daily living.
Yes?
Please!
Because
YES is Love’s presence EveryNow
From the scented gardens of EveryNow
A heavenly space all your own
A kiss is not a kiss if it contains any thoughts of itself. It becomes a dictionary entry, or even worse, a cold stone kiss.
When I encounter a surge of any emotion, any emotion at all, I react with a movement of my mind, like a gleam of recognition at some passing flash of a recollected thought, or I react with a motion, like a smile or a frown.
Sometimes my reaction is physical and involuntary, like an adrenal shudder, or a thing close to a skipped heartbeat. With the reaction over, I am once more a blank sheet, like an unfurled sail ready to receive whatever wind may blow.
I have had the luck to be thrown up against my own company all my life. A life of many decades lived day by day in keener and keener awareness of my surroundings, physical, mental, and mystical.
It has recently become clearer to me that the act of experiencing anything, tiny, or regular-sized, or massive, or transcendental, or overwhelming, is entirely sufficient in itself as a confirmation and as an affirmation of life shared with all other sentient beings.
I invite you to try this.
… … …
Take a seat and be still for a moment, will you?
Place your hand palm up on the table in front of you.
Be at rest, and breathe as would breathe, only be aware of your taking breath. Hear it going in and out.
Now regard the palm of your hand as it regards you. You know it well. It knows you.
With a silent whisper of secretive familiar tenderness, ask your hand to make an inflection of any part of itself. A small, perhaps hardly perceptible movement will eventually come in response to your own quiet loving call.
With long and respectful pauses, try repeating this silent homage from yourself to your own hand a few times more. Each time, concentrate quite furiously on the delicate homage of the union between it and you.
This simple act, which can be full of a curious wonder, is you communing with you. Could it be more simple? Can you avoid smiling?
This connection of self to self, which translates perfectly as self to others, could easily be, for example, a kiss or an embrace. It does not happen by a snap of the fingers.
It is unimportant that you want to skip into bliss as soon as yesterday, or maybe sooner. What matters is that you know there is a heavenly space all your own waiting for you. It always has been and it always will be.
Even though this space, this most sacred sweetest space is a mere breath away from you right now, it is not important that it may take you as many decades as it took me to enter it and to be entered into by it. The thing to do is to drop the impatience, because impatience is simply heavy to carry around with you.
~ Love is present EveryNow
The noise I make, I make by being alive. The footprints of the sounds I make are small.
I breathe, I talk, I cry, I sleep. I never stop making sounds. The sounds I make have small footprints.
I make sounds. Most of the sounds I make as notations in music are rest notes.
The sounds are the sounds of not making sounds. My silences are my companions. My companions are usually invisible.
I know them, my companions, from the first moments I made sounds to and for myself. I heard them with the ears of my ears, outside in the brightly lit, open green fields of my youngest childhood.
The sounds I make can be put down in musical notation. Most are rest notes with limited significance. These rest notes reach my ears. I process them, interpret them, hold hands with them,
The noises I have made throughout my life is a musical score, indiscernible as music. I have produced a few grace notes, which rise above the score. They have a wider footprint. I hang my grace notes on twigs. They sound pretty as I pass back and forth through the forest.
My musical score is like all the other music produced by my fellow beings. My fellow beings are mostly small winged insects. They outnumber human beings. The sounds they make with their wings are their constant companions. These sounds are mostly inaudible to me.
My fellow human beings move. The sounds they make alert me to the Sun, to the Moon, to the seas, to all the things growing in the wide open airs under the vaulted blue skies.
All my days, the music I have made, I make without desiring to create anything. The noises that issue from movements in and from my body are reminders of the energy I release through breathing, thinking, feeling.
I see now there is a music composed of rest notes, white noise, the occasional pure musical tones. These sounds, my constant companions, remind me of my responsibility to try and make harmony out of random.
If I know it, or if I know it not, I have a sacred duty when I open my mouth to hum, or whistle, or speak, or when I look across in silence into the eyes of another.
My responsibility is simple. It is to be in harmony with the energy I draw on when sounds issue from me.
When I am walking on the grass, among trees, on hillsides, on uneven ground close to streams, with the wind in my face, and my feet are placed and placed by my own volition, the energy of my movements is as the energy of light from the almost imperceptible dance of fireflies.
The footprint of the light I create as I move through the natural world is not large. My light is my companion and it is my sole responsibility.
All my long life, it is my light that silently accompanies every instant of my waking thinking dreaming existence.
If I know the light, or if I know it not, now I understand it is with me always. It asks nothing of me, because it is me.
The light is my legacy. I must know that the light I produce has unlimited impact. My light will reveal my purpose, my integrity and the extent to which my harmonious self makes music in my heart
~ Love is present EveryNow
“… 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 the receiver of love.
❤ ❤ ❤
Beyond this and before this inloving outfurling, I am in a place of great safety. I am in this sacred space hand-in-hand with all humanity.
I pause to look and am astonished! I share without effort the life of every living being and thing with every living being and thing.
Oh my friends. My dear and lovely friends
Awareness is not the result of practice for practice implies the formation of habit; habit is the denial of awareness.
Awareness is of the moment and not a cumulative result. To say to myself that I shall become aware is not to be aware. To say that I am going to be non-greedy is merely to continue to be greedy, to be unaware of it.
How to approach a complex problem? Surely it’s not by meeting complexity with complexity; approach it simply, and the greater my simplicity the greater will be the clarification.
To understand and experience Reality there must be utter simplicity and tranquillity. “Must” does not imply compulsion, merely a reminder, a statement of what Reality is.
When I suddenly see a magnificent scenery or come upon a great thought, or listen to great music, I am utterly still. Human minds are not simple, but to recognize complexity is to be simple.
If I wish to understand myself, my complexity, there must be open receptivity, the simplicity of non-identification. But so often people are not aware of beauty or complexity, and so we chatter on.
With acknowledgement of thanks to Krishnamurti
Air, land and sea
Respect for life
in every dimension EveryNow
Will you walk in light along paths of silent awe?
Will you revere the secrets told to you from your right and from your left?
Will you step aside from crunching doubt?
Will you believe your heart’s blood flows green and green and green
💚Green presence EveryNow
I experienced the joyful vibe in Colourfest 2017, and my other few participations very intensely. But I didn’t try to hold on to them.
I can now “do” non-attachment. I would spend decades yearning after the event, preserving memories, keeping keepsakes.
Today I am the conduit. I can deeply swim in and submerge into these fine, fiery, feathery, frolicsome experiences. But I don’t want them to last so much that all I become is a sad curator of memories. That has gone. I’m over all that. It’s a sort of inside of head declutter.
It’s good. It feels “grown up”.
I had a perfectly surprisingly amazing experience on Sunday morning, June 4, 2017.
Nashir Karmali gave a 2 hour lecture on Ayurveda healing practices. Much of it was in the form of delightful anecdotes from his own long years in his own Wimborne practice.
He impressed us all. He comes over as he is, a deeply human and compassionate person, wise, learned, and with a gentle humour.
There must have been at least forty in the elegantly preserved Gaunts House Library. All remained quiet and respectfully attentive in the room throughout.
I knew Nashir’s talk would “use up” all the calm sunny weather on that day. I knew the weather would deteriorate from midday on.
But I dismissed as selfish idle ego chit-chat the idea of “bunking” it! And Nashir himself had, after all, personally invited me.
So I stayed to the end.
At the end, we were asked to partner off into healing/listening pairs. We were told, “Sit face to face, eye in eye, holding hands, look deep into the honourable soul we see in the eyes before us. For the first part, one touches the wrists of the other at the pulse.”
I remained sat down while the others got up, walked and mixed to find their partners.
I know from Biodanza I am way down the list of pairing choices owing to my minority age group, as I was here.
Only one unpaired person remained.
Before me is a woman with a forceful confident manner. She is a young woman. Certainly of good family. Someone well-educated and sure of her place in her society.
Her face is pleasingly round and open. Her symmetrical features lend her a certain classical nobility older than her years.
All went quiet. I am touching her pulse on both her wrists. I cannot detect much if any beat. But it is contact. We both ignore what Nashir was saying about what to do and say, because we have become absorbed in each others gaze.
I find she had a tranquillity bordering on nobility.I say quietly,
“You are far more beautiful than even you will admit.”
She smiles. It is a compliment.
Then I begin to see and to feel inside of me something completely contrary to and at odds with the composed expression on her nice symmetrical face.
Here’s the thing. I became more and more restless. My stomach twisted. I see her calm face cloud slightly with a sadness. But what I feel is her fear!
I say,
“You are not as composed as you are projecting. You have had a shock, you have had a frightening experience. It is recent. You came to this festival in spite of carrying this with you.”
Her eyes filled, although the facade I had looked through was still strong and was not about to fail her.
I asked if she would share.
She said I was right. She said the day before the festival, her boyfriend, who lives across the road, had dumped her.
I asked her how she had felt this in her heart. She was torn up inside, she said.
Neither of us expressed an objective opinion about how or why I had “seen” this from only her eyes. Since then (only 36 hours ago) I have not foolishly distracted myself by marvelling at the phenomenon of this vision.
I accept it and am surprised is all. I find it suggests that I may have the ability to help others more than I had realised.
In the last moments together, I said,
“The pain and turmoil inside you does not ‘belong’ to you. You don’t own it, and it doesn’t own you. It is a hard to live with emotion, which will pass, like all emotions.
We are not mechanisms. We have no off-switches.
What is permanently yours is the light of love in your own heart from which you came, to which you will return.
That is your strength and that is what will support and sustain you through this time. Keep your heart in view, do not try to examine your heart’s pain.
Your closeness to your living heart will be what helps shorten this period of pain.”
It was her turn. She looked at me and she said I was very very calm. Hearing, or rather seeing her see this, I suddenly felt like collapsing.
I had to close my eyes, look down, bite my lip to avoid breaking down. I composed myself. I said,
“Under this I am in turmoil.” Quickly I added,
“But this is only what is on me now. I am at peace in my heart.”
She asked to hug. We hugged. Moments later we were both gone.
What do you think, dear Friend?
At street level, our lives are tangled.
Look up, and see what magic true entanglement creates!
~ Love’s presence EveryNow
None of us are ever alone in the path we take, nor in the circumstances of the path, however dire or distressing.
In the vast ocean of life, though we are billions, the number of common threads of humanity in which we all have a share is surprisingly small.
“Today is a long time ago”
My friend Bryan Alkins said on Friday 2nd October 2015 – “The past is the past! How far in the past doesn’t matter. Live in the moment. 🙏”
If I occasionally believe I am dangerously far divorced from “normality”, because all that matters is what’s going on now, I will beg my pardon and I will still defer to the moment.
I have long held the view (for near on forty years) that those who disavow the mystical and say there is no thing beyond the material and the provable, are trapped in a bubble of mystic magic divinity which knows and loves them, but which is sadly not visible to them.
These days I am believing it is simpler even than all of that.
Those who have not begun to bathe totally in the now cannot conceive of doing so. They believe it has no value to them, because what does not relate to their own lived experience appears to them as unsubstantiated evidence without the necessary confirmation of cause and effect.
EveryNow is that lived bliss of unconditional immediacy of experience without reference to past, future, or to labels of name or pertainment.
People who relate every present moment to its antecedent and who take care to measure it by its potential future effect make the mistake of regarding EveryNow as a state of instability from which no practical outcomes through reason and judgement are to be initiated.
After all, whoever thought it wise to choose to be a passenger in a vehicle driven by a person in a state of bliss?
Fear is sometimes taken to be the inevitable next step after identification with uncertainty. To see new ways of being as strange is to associate those who operate from this state as strange and then perhaps as people to be feared.
Nothing is more precise, more glaringly pinpointed with a sense of the absolute than EveryNow!
Long Live Love’s presence EveryNow
Here are reasons to be glad, to be grateful, because every giant effort of will we make to take just one step, every step we stumble at, every time we call out in agony, we unite with every human who ever endured, screamed and moved on.
Far too many of those I know have had to un-shipwreck themselves after being all but capsized by cruel storms of other people’s making.
I try not to make sweeping generalisations, or say things that cannot be proven by some investigation. In all truth, I cannot think of any person I have ever met who does not live with some heavy burden of pain. Can you look through the front doors of your own family, friends, acquaintances and say, “There lives a human with a heart free of all hurt?”
We are strong beyond any adequate means of describing our strengths. I believe no trauma, no setback, no block on our way can finally dim, disfigure or extinguish our inner light.
Yet there are two things we are definitely not suited to suffer. These are physical violence or isolation. These sorrows figure in the storylines of so very many people. I include illness or disabilities in such unwanted, unwelcome and insufferable tempests.
I am extremely fortunate to have avoided the worst of such crippling external influences.
It is not true to say I do not live with God in my life. It’s just that I am aware that by publicly aligning myself with a Western religious orthodoxy, I automatically draw down iron curtains from those I most care about and most wish not to be distanced from.
It’s a sad fact of life that such labels are capable of thwarting the transmission of exactly those truths that are universally recognised.
In my EveryNow blogs, I avoid direct reference to religious nomenclature in order to keep the channels of positivity flowing without distraction, and without the additional identifiable baggage that I see as secondary and non-essential.
This is my own Motto, the final words I most often use to place my seal on my writings…
“Love is present EveryNow”
You, or any reader, can readily replace the word Love with their own named deity.
My impulse to avoid any form of evangelical message comes from my distrust of organised religion, particularly the Western dualistic orthodoxies.
My adherence is to the present moment. This is where infinity and all the goodness therein lies waiting to be found, simultaneously to be consumed by us and to consume us with no diminishment!
The View at 72+ 