Share the love

Suddenly simply the delicious honey of gratitude

When my flower comes to the end, it melts into the earth it rose from…

I am bursting to tell you that an opening into an understanding has appeared to me. It has made things much less complicated. It has removed shed-loads of stress and taken away my false sense of obligation to myself and others.

I began journaling daily from my year of heart awakening in 2013. The collected curated posts began to form into my EveryNow blog on WordPress in 2018. The urge to “share the love” spurred me on and on to add more and more to EveryNow.

The act of sitting down time and time again to compose a new journal is itself a form of focused thinking, of meditative practice. I never can tell where my train of thought will lead. I know it’s important to exert my skills of thinking to remain in truth and logic. What words and what structures I select need to serve truth and logic with clarity.

In November 2019, my mortality tapped me hard on my shoulder with a heart arrhythmia. My heartbeat suddenly went up to 162 and stayed there.

Whatever else might be about to happen to me, I knew I wanted to preserve and protect EveryNow as my legacy, my personal expression of my love of life. So while I waited my turn for surgery, I threw money at Facebook in order to extend and accelerate the geographic readership of my blog. 

I created my Facebook page “EveryNow”. This form of advertising broadcasting has had some effect. A few tens of thousands have seen EveryNow who would never have known about it.

My troubling medical disturbance was mercifully cured, virtually eliminated, by a simple, short procedure in 2020, by another in 2023, and by a Pacemaker implant in 2024.

I saw relatively huge numbers of paid for “hits” with Facebook on EveryNow, tens of thousands of them, compared to my ordinary Facebook likes in mostly single digits. I am thunderstruck, by the complete absence of engagement from any of them, in the EU, the USA and the UK. Although I have had no dislikes, I received no likes and no comments.

What does this mean for comprehending the behaviour of my new audience? And what does this great indifference say to me, and tell me about my attempt to make ripples, plant seeds, create new webs of connection through the beloved child of my heart, EveryNow?

With my own online presence, I continue to see others, present like me, “Sharing the Love”. My having joined them enables me to see what I am trying to express and present more ‘in-the-round’.

In a much wider objective perspective, my almost daily on-line presence since 2013, is on the scale of one fish in a planet-wide ocean of fish. Add to those fish, all the fish in rivers and lakes, and I can visualise my self-image to the correct scale: infinitesimally small! 

It’s gratifying that my blog shows signs that it may have begun to reach a critical audience mass where the audience is growing without my adding new blog posts. One or two per week are seeing my blog posts. Look, no hands! New followers are following from the old.

I used to magine readers would report to me their reactions and new conversations might grow wings of inspiration, spawn new communion.

In short, I reckoned that I have something of value, that I am saying something significant, and that there are people I don’t yet know who want to read more about what I am saying.

Every one of these assumptions and basic premises have no basis in fact!

My words are not set to catchy pop melodies, my ideas are not the stuff of viral jokes, catchy lyrics which spiral up the charts on fire, like fireworks in the sky. 

My words are truths clad in pastel colours. They arise from identical wellsprings of humanity as the emotions of any other person.

What I report on is one presence among all the other presences. The main difference is that I happen to be broadcasting it. This is no cause for others to sit up and take notice. It is hardly a reason for others to open one eye to me. After all, as I never get tired of saying, “Love is present EveryNow”.

If my art consists in saying I am as human and as alive as you, this is sufficient for the moment in which my words and images interact with another person. More relevant still, it shows that this is amply sufficient for me also.

Here is the fork in the road. I have two choices according to what I think I have become.

My first choice is, I could choose to try again to enlarge EveryNow’s audience by financing more Facebook advertising. It can cost as little as one pound per day, and I am able to monitor the results closely. 

By doing this, I can focus on the urgent calls of love that my heart, ears, eyes and mind shout out at every turn and step on my daily path. I can decide to completely devote my resources to give priority to the all-consuming feelings of urgency in the call to love that I find is so strong within me at all times.

So what’s it to be?

When my flower, my soul is not here any longer, when it comes to the end and it melts into the earth it rose from, it will remain as one of the myriad expressed forms of love forever.

One of the top attributes of this call to love is unabating newness. My emotional responses to external stimuli seem to react as if everything is continually new, everything is happening for the first time. This counterintuitive, even downright illogical, highly receptive ‘hypernew’ state contributes such a lot to my desire to share the love. I do recognise it as a state of Grace. 

Gradually, step by step, since this awakened state came about in 2013, I have been prompted to acknowledge to myself the fact of my new 24/7 condition – so akin to bliss unshakeable – because of the mirroring I have received from those close to me whose integrity and honesty I respect. 

In parallel to this broadening acceptance of who, and more significantly, of what I am, my own self-compassion, my self-love has grown up to increase and become real too.

Here is an example. The point arrived some time in 2020, when I fully understand my fear of death is fear no more! 

The EveryNow blog offers other people what I see as unusual and precious about what is happening on the other side of that magic portal which opened to me in 2013. That’s why the Blog seems to be the bandwagon to leap onto!

My second choice is, I can step away from that image of me as one fish among trillions. I can shy away from the urge to increase, embellish, emblazon and enlarge my shadow under the sun. I can accept the concept of my membership of the Swarm of life. My life as a Pixel of Humanity is enough.

From the moment I fully understand what it means to be a Pixel of Humanity, I fully  arrive at a place of pure acceptance, and purest peace, too! I know the simple joy of being alive, sentient and sensual. My acceptance of this disarmingly exquisite experience of mine, of loving to live, equates to that of any other beings, great or small, sentient or not.

It needs saying that the sensual aliveness I participate in, moment to moment, is flavoured by the delicious honey of gratitude for it all.

I hardly find it necessary to differentiate between the ecstacy I feel when an empathy moment arises that lets me savour my intimate proximity to a pebble, or to a flower ‘in the flesh’, never mind the delight of meeting with another loving, living being, animal or vegetable in deep heart’s communion.

Here’s the thing. After I have made the all important distinction between the quality of love and the quantity of the qualities of which love is the bearer, I no longer want or need to try to grasp at the latter, because the former shows itself to me as so comprehensively sufficient.

From the moment I unreservedly accept that my voice among many voices praising and extolling love is like a summer flower in a gigantic flowering meadow, every thought, every emotion is stripped of layers of meaning and becomes quite suddenly simply enough.

~ Love is present EveryNow

🟡🔎Solar burn🔍🟡

Posto 10, Ipanema

I packed a few pine tree wood discs, sandpapered for this trip, along with my lenses.

I choose a quiet spot to set up ‘shop’ on Ipanema beach. I seat myself on my folding camp stool on the sand with my back turned three-quarters to the Sun. Polished wood in my left hand, a smallish lens in my right.

Now I have arrived. I’m in shorts, peaked cap on my head. I’m wearing glasses that protect me from 85 per cent of sunlight and from all harmful rays.

I am here at one of the most famous beauty spots on the planet. After the relative greyness of Northern Europe, I should be hyper aware of the privilege of being on Ipanema Beach. Normally my senses would be opened and scanning. I’d be drinking, seeing, hearing and loving these moments in paradise on earth.

As always, the meditative buzz of Solar Pyrography welcomes me. Soon my breathing slows, my mind empties, and what I am doing takes all of my focus. Smoke and occasionally sweet resin-scented flames rise from my wood disc, as if from a sacrificial offering.

When people see me, they nudge each other, pause and say, “Look what that man’s doing!” It’s easy to leave them on the edge of my vision.

The kids are not so shy. They barge in close. Thankfully they accept me with my monosyllabic noises. Some notice their shadows block my work. My lens moves on. Who will go home and try for themselves this trick of fire with a lens and sunlight? I am always amazed that Solar Burning is such an unknown activity in hot countries.

The Rio sun hurts. I’m in a race to finish my commission before the thirst and the pain drive me away. I’m not sunning myself, swimming, surfing, strolling along admiring the sea, the surf or the mountains. I am not drinking Brahma beer or ice-cold fresh juice from coconut stalls.

I am here, but I am not here! I am in an altogether other place.

It is as heavenly as this fabulous Brazilian holiday destination. This heavenly place is entirely contained inside of me by the precisely controlled actions of my body as I focus Sun energy through a glass onto pine wood

The engaged couple’s initials, B and D, woven into a heart made of hearts above the Lover’s Knot, looks ready to me. I hope they like it back home in Dorset.

Meditation on Strength

A meditation on strength ⚡

A meditation on Strength

This image presents as a shield for a meditation on Strength.

The viewer is invited to place their attention on either elevation, facing or from the obverse.

Intermediate rotational views are available from every degree of the 360°.

Views are freely available in yaw, roll and pitch, in any desired combination of the axes of rotation.

If no attention is directed, if no thought comes, if there is no light, no dark, no significance of any kind, what remains for those who may be about to turn from this offered gift?

Intense purity of peace and love remain.

With the law of conservation of energy, nothing at all goes to waste.

The continuation of the streaming of powerful loving kindness remains.

Nothing passes unnoticed to the compassionate eye.

Love present EveryNow is powerful like the unimaginable energies lolling and roiling in the interior of Sol, our Sun.

Love present EveryNow is tender like the last rays of light, which took a hundred thousand years to come to the surface of the Sun, and which trickle over the  horizon’s edge at the setting of the Sun

~ Love is present EveryNow

From Breath to Love

From Breath to Love – A guided meditation

TUESDAY 25th SEPTEMBER was the monthly Breathwork session “From Breath to Love – Conscious Breathing Circle” held by Karolina Mikulicz here in our home town.

When I arrived, I was the only one attending! So we agreed to have a 1-2-1 session.

After what happened to me in the last fortnight, I was in a state of high sensitivity and receptivity. I may share in another piece of writing, when I feel to gather the story together. It’s enough to say I had begun to make preparations in the last few days in the light of reasonable cause to believe the days of my life were numbered. It transpires that I am in no such danger. This is relief that I compare to being hit by a ton of bricks.
Karolina is, to me, wise far beyond her young years. Knowing how she has assimilated the healthy therapeutic effects of her own daily Breathwork practice over many years, I have come to have complete confidence in her skills as guide and facilitator. We always reach deep when we work together.
So, to be brief, (a tricky skill for me!) an obscuring chunk of cliff face fell away… almost all resistance due to fear melted away as if under high intensity radiation.
In the course of this evening’s guided Breathwork I found my core being, I call it: my unchanging awareness. I found my unfractionated identity, I see it as a white transparency with no material substance yet having the form of a swan’s body and whose being is available in maximal energy to enfold with arms, protect without limit or condition, to imbue me with life-power while not at all concealing or covering me.
In 1977, I had come face-to-face with this core essence of my being with the common descriptor being a white-hot kernel. The image of a light concentrated into white heat had arrived then. During my awakening in 2013, and ever since, up till today, the vision of awareness of my own heart has been of an orange-gold glow in my heart space.
In summer 1977, I entered a period of pain and incomprehension, and an involuntary process began. One by one, layers of self identity fell away from me. I felt with great alarm that I was soon to lose my sanity. At length all that was left of this 31 year old man, of his certainty and his received assumptions about himself was reduced to a white-hot molten pool resting immobile at the bottom of a huge immovable crucible.
Today’s “Real”isation arrived as a direct effect of having been able to release all vestiges of fear of trying and seeking by walking in the bravery of trust and innocent belief in the total support of the earth under me and the clean oxygen I fill my lungs with.
Something changed tonight.
There was no upheaval and certainly no pain. Pain comes only as an equal and opposite reaction to resistance. Abandon of resistance and its replacement with the gentleness of compassion and a childlike humility is what characterised the session this time. Karolina threw at me unanswerable questions. She stayed, guided and was by my side. I responded from my truth.
Later, at the end, we talked. This is how I tried to make clear what had changed inside during the latter part of our working session. A sacred chant that I remember I had sung before, and whose Sanskrit words I had learned, had been playing in the background. I was not the listener with this music in my ears. The music was playing me and my hearing was the music playing. The music was playing in me. I was conscious of not being the listener. I had no involvement in the joining of the music with my hearing.
A blending took place that I was fully aware of as it happened. I have entered a fusion between my core original self and the sensory experience of the material World around me.
Here I can not go all the way with words to describe this. I was totally receptive to the music while not needing to make any conscious effort at distinguishing it as musical sounds to which I was paying attention. The effect was of music happening in the way my blood happens to circulate in my body. The music was involuntarily musical in me. This utterly new experience was welcome and most lovely. I felt with all my senses and all my awareness the freshness of it.
With this clearing, whatever happens next, my lack of fear of my own death has received a big boost.
Karolina suggested I write up about this session. My thanks to Karolina takes the form of this short description.