*Suddenly with a blinding glare of recognition like a bright epiphany*

It happened suddenly at the end of a lovely afternoon taking tea for the first time at home with a special Friend and mutual confidante, one with whom I had had long intimate conversations up until then, but only through text messages.

And so it happened. Suddenly a giant door to my understanding began to open and light began to glow and I saw something mirrored inside me.

My Friend, Susie Gareh Minto, was visiting me at home, where I was convalescing after a hip replacement operation in 2014.

For a couple of hours, we had been discussing life in the way good friends so enjoy. My naturally joyful, expressive, extrovert Friend was much elated and in full flow, when she did a simple thing, but it surprised me greatly as I sat in my armchair.

She suddenly got up out of her armchair and, speaking very loud, she demonstrated over me how it all “is” for her by standing with her arms out, hands reaching to hold the sky.

Shortly after, it was time to go. And we went out into the garden.

As we spoke our farewells outside, we embraced, quietly.

What was – continues to be and always will be time without end – so exceedingly exciting, is the full and total realisation, which simply “arrived” for me, of the being that I am.

The excitement of the realisation has a curiously calm and matter-of-fact quality. The best way I can describe the unique authenticity of this emotional and intellectual understanding is exciting and matter-of-fact at one and the same time.

I wrote to my Friend shortly afterwards, “For this delicious process of enlightenment, I have much to be thankful for.”

My friend wrote back, “What can I say, except – beautiful news. It is a lovely authentic connection that you have entered into.”

What Susie wrote next was inspired, and I knew immediately that she described the unlocking and the throwing away of the key to the place I had imprisoned myself in for so long.

I have set my Friend’s words into a first person singular narrative, and added here and there my own authenticity…

I am sure a great unlocking has taken place and now I can enter into finding and realising a much greater fullness of love from within.

In fact throughout all my apparent external and very surprising rushes of loving connection that I have been making in recent months, perhaps all along it was that I have been repeatedly shown my own amazing deep pool of love within.

But I had been ‘mistaking’ the beautiful vision as being a ‘love’ that needed to be sought and expressed externally.

The process of opening had begun, and I was reaching out from inside my dark home-made fortress place. I had constructed it with extreme thoroughness and efficiency during the years of my early childhood.

However, I had carried on sheltering in such darkness well beyond its usefulness for several decades.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude and respect to my inner child who had protected me by drawing on his own primitive source of love. He built defensive fortifications. These served me very well as a necessary place in which to survive.

It was not so much a place of darkness, as a place sequestered from “light”. In truth, there is no darkness, only a passing in front of light. I am talking about the light of human connection, and indeed all forms, from simple conversation to the most universally revered sacred connections.

When those first cracks of light had started pouring into my own dark space, I believed – as is probably natural – that I was finding something exciting outside of myself, when in reality all along what was being revealed to me was my own marvellous light!

For more than half a century, I lived on in the dark. I know I am far from having been alone in spending time at one remove from the full experience of living life in all its abundance and glory.

I knew about the majesty of light and peace, and about the love that can take root and flourish in it. But I neither saw nor yet recognised my own portion of light directly.

The most amazing thing is, when I am fully present in my own light, it connects healthily with the light of others, and in so doing we quite simply reflect each other’s light.

Each time we allow this to happen, with the courage of open hearts, we receive a beautiful and healing reminder of the brightness of our own light.

This is truly it – for me, for us, for the world. We are beacons of light and our challenge is to realise that the light we see outside is a reflection of the light we are inside.

So now, I can be a worshipper as I move in the world of the everyday sublime, in reverent awe at the joy of the little “ten thousand” things all around me wherever I go.

These continual acts of reflective worship continue to allow the light of my original love to shine out, and keep it shining.

From here, without fear or harm, I can acknowledge another’s light by reflecting to them what they see mirrored in me.

I remember always, I respect and honour always that this is their own light and they are the guardian of their own light.

I do believe the light within all sentient beings has no beginning and no end and I believe it is our connection to the eternal, the divine, the universal vector of all life everywhere

~ Love is present  E v e r yN o w