There are so many layers to the exercise of choice. I can choose! That is a first. I can choose to go. That’s an adventure beginning. I can choose to go with the flow, to disturb nothing when I arrive, to be one among the passing breezes.
And I can choose to know my footfall is noticed by no one and nothing at the shores of time, like my smile to myself in the dark just before sleep overtakes my sore heart!
It’s Zen-like. When I step back from the sharp end and I choose to grasp at nothing, with the careful and compassionate exercise of choice, in the end peace arrives.
Peace takes up residence at my head and feet. I know it’s present, because it loudly makes zero demands of space or time.
As I stand at the sandy shores of peace, do I know if I am the one who watches the ripples rippling? Am I the ripples? My heart cannot be doing with such questions, when it is rippling with love unending 🕊️
The thing about trying is it’s so easy to forget that search and arrival are minor punctuation in the flow of the impermanent ever-changing unvarying transience of it all.
Flow and flux are good reminders of where reality really is at…
I, five-pointed star creature, am a creature of thoughts. I think because I think. I am amused and bemused by the thoughts I listen to.
I receive parental and peer suggestion that encourage me to rely on my “powers of thought”.
I am later informed of the pointlessness of over-thinking, and later still I am warned about giving credence to the chattering “monkey” mind.
I am in truth another creature of the gardens of Eden, alike unto the sentient beings who share my air, earth, and water.
I am naturally attuned to the rhythms of light and dark, hunger and thirst.
I am another seeker after warmth and the supportive companionship of others like myself.
The time I spend in awareness of my own awareness is self absorbing and attractive.
Think! How much time do I devote to my physical comfort, to awareness of my bodily condition?
Stop! What feedback is my muscular framework giving me?
Ask! What if any noteworthy messages am I receiving from my soma, my joints and tendons, my fascia, the involuntary state of my breathwork?
I can do myself a simple and all-too-rare an honour by listening to myself, by conversing with my soma.
I, as five-pointed star creature, breathe and beat time to a clock of blood.
The form of this timepiece is as far from the assumed reality of my bird-like thought patterns as the ocean depths are from the jetstream.
Pause and see all these are interconnected.
It is when I am injured or unwell that I can see examples of the ungraspable timescales on which my body clock operates.
As I begin to recover, to recuperate, I cannot see any needle on a dial that moves towards wholeness or wellness. It becomes apparent with hindsight, and then only by an effort of will, that I can compare yesterday with today and observe minor changes for the better.
Happiness depends so much more than I have been led to believe on living, on carrying out the routines that sustain my bodily functions.
To tell myself I depend on one part or other of who I am – whether it is mind, body or spirit – is to miss the wood for the trees.
I am inclined to grasp at fleeting satisfactions, pleasures, successes, drownings. Howsoever tangible they are, they are passing moments in the greater flow.
When the flow is seen to be where and what and who I am part of, that is when I can rest, take my ease, find comfort and be for the most part at peace with myself and with my fellows.
It’s been about sixty-six years. I see life as a Flow. We human beings have more in common with the Swarm of life, than with our individual goings and comings.
Even when outstanding individuals express monumental truths, the light emitted by them is momentary, because their expressions relate to core pillars of existence, and these are what everyone has in common with everything.
If one person sees a fragment of universal brilliance, and urgently shares it, it is not the person, but the starkly appearing light which grabs our attention.
If an artist shines a light on something, that thing is not spotlit, it is some extra thing of everything that is seen illuminated.
I read with fascination and admiration about journeys of awakening on Facebook, and I love to speak about matters of the heart with close friends.
I see more than ever theirs matches my own journey of exploration of ideas about the progress of the soul.
In particular, and most recently, the fundamental predominance of the Swarm, the Collective Spirit or Soul of humanity shows up.
Like the view of the rising of the Sun or Moon, when I as individual progress towards clear unobstructed vision of my place in the Cosmos, I see reflections and similarities in so many other eyes and minds and hearts all along the generations.
My sense is, when discovering threads of thought in common, I tread on shared steps on paths in common.
My sense is of a warm “welcome home” feeling that those puzzles I have independently struggled to understand are valid subjects to struggle with.
I may have passed decades questing for significance and meaningful truths together with myself, separate from the madding crowd, like a hermit, or a Pole Percher, because isolation had been mine for the first 66 years.
My vindication today is I realise that I climbed the mountain perhaps out of ignorance by the long hard route, yet I breathe in the same panoramic views at the summit, as those who were led there by the hand, or even those who rode there easy on cushioned palanquins!
I am a journeyman of old. These apprentices were shown the time-honoured methods, they picked up on the rules of thumb, they gained in skill at a patient pace measured in long Moon cycles.
After such deep cultivation of modus operandi, constructed by past generations of patient travail, and observed with reverential respect by these artisans and craftspeople, their time became fertilised with precious knowledge.
These workers produced their own examples of their crafts using their own dexterity, deftness, lightness of touch. Their learned and time-perfected skills also became a part of their way of life.
They neither boasted nor hid their extensive skills. They were inseparable from who they were. They got on with the job.
What’s my job?
I want to help show others how love, in its blessed power and tenderly disposed majesty, waits with all the patience of the arching sky, to be softly welcomed in.
I want to help show that this startling, monumental and terribly welcome love, when it becomes visible through the thinnest of thin veils, is always ready to hold hands with you in your heart of hearts.
I live to see the sunrise-smile moment of recognition when this love’s first greeting names and reveals itself as resident Peace at the core essence of you and of each one of us.
That epiphany moment when you just know darkness will never, can never return!
Blindly seek no stones where only jewels of love pertain. Intense love, though blind, removes every vestige of shade, doubt, fear.
And everywhere there is love.
The best to you on this day’s end, your day’s beginning, whoever, wherever you are on the planet
There is a current, a flow of power, which beckons, asks to be found.
From the earliest age of the dawning of reason, it asks to be heard.
On my own in a wild garden, small under trees, I, a little boy, caught the drift of it.
It came from a crystalline heart. It showed itself in my throat in the form of a tune voiced into my solitude. A solitude for the first time become great with meaning.
The melody is always the same. It is a grand, a grandiose orchestral pursuit. Cathedrals, temples, chambers of the heart can hardly contain its sacred theme.
The riff I sang matched the mood of this boy. I later went into the house and sang it to my Mother. She made a motherly nice comment.
As a young man, I began to recognise parts of this homespun improvisation in the music of others, and I knew myself to be one melody, a part in a common harmony – a pixel of humanity.
I never fully remember it. I never developed it into a memorisable form. I kept it private, I keep my ‘plaint’, my ‘keening’ as it is a forever balm unto my unknown, hurting, longing heart.
Today I sprout in these lonely lines this remembered memory of memory, and the flame of its flower is a visible wonder to me, father to myself.
Exactly like the passage of a rainbow, it beckons to the senses. It will never be captured.
The bass notes inflame, while the melody maddens like the sempiternel arch-old songs of the Sirens.
This is a sacred music, which can only be bashfully reflected in the performance of various forms – poetry, dance, painting, sculpture.
The more ephemeral is our way of reflecting the force of its current, the closer we come to tap into and draw purpose and courage from its strength. It is all mystery and achingly longed-for strength.
The presence of strength; the strength of presence. This is a reflection of the power of the eternal present
The View at 72+ 