We are all as alike as peas in a pod. Grass and flowers die. Houses and mountains crumble.
We have in common – every one of us – our innate sense of self-preservation, our basic humanity, our need in common for love, air, food, drink, warmth, security, safety.
I recoil from trying to assimilate enough knowledge of politics or religion to become capable of qualifying my modes of thought or action according to their principles or precepts.
All my observations of the continuum in which I exist point to one thing – transience. The further back in my time I retreat, I still see the same quality of impermanence.
This predictable unpredictability, which in isolation would resemble a pit of empty despair, always presents laced with scents, colours and shapes of love.
EveryNow is my shorthand for the unending orgasm of loving to live, EveryNow is my X and Y and Z axes of celebration of the joyful flow of existence.
My reference of my sentient consciousness to that flow of change, to that intimate turbulence in my microcosm, is mirrored in the indiscernible motion of the violent unfurling of energetic matter in the Universal macrocosm.
All these things are fractals of flux.
I say, let them take high precedence among the attributes worth taking the trouble and time identifying with, regardless of our physical shape, financial stability, health, grounding or lack of grounding,
Dive in! Submerge, let the savage unknowability of fractal flux close over my head while it is under this influence. Be attached to it, take inspiration for decisions to action, give official recognition to it as the truth and validity suffused through and through the heart of the being of the next bystander in the bus queue. Or in me!
The fact of suffering is much less useful to understand.
Time spent on focus on pain is time not spent in the pursuit and sharing of the celebration of bliss in all its forms and infinite fluctuations.
Think about it… We come complete with pain at birth, and viewed from within, pain advances our understanding almost not at all of the peace and love that animates us, from which we all arise and back to which we are all dancing each other home
🐣The unexpected quiet trumpet call that awakens me to the stasis of bliss🕊️
As a boy, I was for a while an avid reader of sci-fi comics. They contained individual short stories. I willingly gave myself up to be lost in them.
I always remember how one particular ‘Alien’ described itself. This being, stranded on our planet Earth, said of itself I am “An Entity without Identity”.
The predicament of this creature from Outer Space has always beckoned to me. Whatever quality, whatever identity was attributed or assigned to it, that was what it instantly became!
A child passed by in the park, found what he said was a ball. On that instant, to his alien chagrin, this voyager from the great beyond became a rubber ball and the child began to play with it.
The child met an older man in the same park, who explained that the interior of a star contains matter at such extreme high density that a ball like the boy was holding could weigh as much as a battleship.
All at once, it was so! Crowds of people flocked to the park to see it and to try to move it.
Luckily for this unhappy stranded cosmic traveller, after several misadventures arising out of mismatched identities, someone with compassion and advanced gifts of logic got it back on its galactic journey again by assigning to it a cleverly constructed sequence of identities.
My fascination with this story was an example of my early attraction to the expression of myself as fluid impermanence, fully filled with and indeed intuitively comprised of the potential of possibilty. It is a concept with which I was later to find stimulating parallels in Zen.
So when someone sees me for example as “full of surprises”, in a trice, this is in truth my core persona…
If I am to some “open, creative and full of life”, all at once this is the truth of me. I do not change. I am what I see is mirrored by those who take me into their momentary gaze.
For the time of being, in an identity made solely of vulnerability, everything is possible. It is all true EveryNow. Nothing is excluded. Until the next trumpet call!
The stark truth of the transience and the impermanence of living has never, in most of our lifetimes, been so vivid and so fearfully close to our day to day.
I arrived for a holiday in Israel. Two days later war was declared.
During a war, no one has a convenient book to pull off the shelf to look up how it all ended.
I have grown to love, respect and feel comfortable with the immediate reality of the reality of continual change.
Make no mistake, I fear for us all.
At the same time, change is a pivotal quality of the present moment – the EveryNow. It’s my happy place.
This world we have all grown up in together is now visibly changing. Global pandemic, violent destructive storms, World War. The ground under my feet no longer offers me unquestioned stability.
I weep for this wonderful world. I am deeply in love with this world of wonders.
I would do well to acknowledge the extent to which change is a constant. I notice the stories my mind tells me about the safety and comfort of the daily routine distract and mislead me.
The world I knew yesterday does not resemble the world today. It’s important to be conscious that change is deeply aligned to the reality of existence. There’s no existence without change.
These factors, change, transience, impermanence, are influences in so many ways on all our waking and non-waking moments.
What is it that prompts me to rely on, trust, and fully expect the daily routine to offer me stability and peace of mind? This is my mind. Whenever mind operates like a toy clockwork train on primitive single tracks, I see it is incorrect.
If I desire the fullest possible grasp on the blissful beauty of a deeply lived alive life, it is well to take on board that my mind, heart and body are subject to the transient, to the temporary, to the wild unpredictable.
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, family, friends, acquaintances, strangers I meet, are all brilliantly illuminated by the shining peace in the heart of this moment together!
Be glad that we, you, I, like the dust, the very ground beneath our bodies, are made of impermanence.
The View at 72+ 