Look out for signs of the return of Springtime in your mind!
I ask myself, “What are my own signs of Spring?”
In my case, on the threshold of seven and seventy, I see a different way to view my crumbling. At this period, when I need to pay more attention to my body signalling it needs my help, and sometimes on a daily basis, I do find my old body is asking for favours and easements. These stop signs show me as always that everything is in a state of change.
These days, I have a clear choice. More choices open up to me, when I am viewing my thoughts the way I see clouds float by in a blue sky. Fewer choices are within reach, when I forget to remember emotional clouds aren’t made of concrete!
Do I fret and become impatient?
Fretting and impatience are markers of futile attention to detail in the past or the future. The time I take out to indulge in anxious thoughts or to stamp my foot in impatience, is time wasted. Not only is time-wasting a serious misuse of what I have, I don’t have nearly as much of it left to fritter away!
Or do I welcome these claims on my time?
Do I treat them as new unlived lessons to learn, and new prompts to teach me and guide me towards taking more interested and compassionate care of myself? At random intervals, my body returns unexpected sensations of pain. It signals that it’s no longer instantly and uncomplainingly able to obey my brain’s motor impulses.
All this newness I can take as a hark back to the earlier, far more surprising, and deeply delicious newness which enveloped me like a shining cloud back in the Year of my Life 2013. That is what I prefer to choose to be reminded of.
The appreciation of the pure and mathematical fundamental principles which underlie the way living beings assume their form and ‘operate’ is one essential bridge towards a deeper understanding of my place in this experience of being alive.
At times I might veer off and begin to wonder, “Is Life math?”
Then I remember that neither one thing nor the other came first.
My consciousness arises from both.
In the moment I exist “EveryNow”, I am both alive and an ineffable part of life. I am both alive and I am being lived by life.
Who cannot be brimming with excitement at the unfolding potential of discovery where no two moments are alike, and the centre-stage constant is newness? This excitement is endless in the way of fractal endlessness.
It is the acknowledgement of, and the gratitude for the enjoyment of this very endlessness which is entirely sufficient and delightfully, finitely my own.
This is what gives rise to the chuckle of the enlightened.
I am as appreciative of this as it is humanly within my power. And I try to act accordingly.
I find a lot of peace rises in me as I begin working in our little patch of green garden.
I am rested.
These days, if I have no physical stress, such as fatigue, my state of inner stillness comes in closer. And I only have to turn my attention inwards to feel that same old Butterflies in the Tummy of being in love!
This was the state of being I entered, during my first experiences of Biodanza, and, with the witness of some shining soulfriends, I underwent an excavation which openly revealed my naked heart to me and to others way back in 2013, a year I call the “Year of my Life”.
I have grown to recognise this feeling of being permanently in love as a state of Grace. I am vaguely curious to find similar people who can “swap notes” about it with me. But I have begun to think that analysis or the naming of objects won’t change anything for me, nor will it show me anything new.
The state I entered into in the Year of My Life was propelled there by a number of emotional shocks or Epiphanies, which I have written up elsewhere on my EveryNow blog.
My emotional landscape is characterised by an illogical sense of continual and continuing newness.
Illogical, because a new awareness or new experience of feelings generally subsides over time, and the outlines decay to take on the perspective of something old, of something like “been there, done that”.
There is nothing old hat about my emotional state whenever I touch into my heart and feel the love. I cannot detect anything I can refer to as, “Oh, yes those finished and tidied away things over there!”
This puzzles me when I think about it. But that’s as far as it goes when I hold it up to examine it.
In fact, the place I have reached inside is like a wide open feeling of shared universal connection when walking a forest trail. Wide open, yes, except it’s “bigger on the inside than the outside”.
With my most sacred space being all filled up, comes a perception of pure energy, disembodied and unrelated to spatial position.
Where good fiction is made believable by a suspension of disbelief, so the sense of being in love in isolation from and absolutely removed from any object for the love, takes on the form of a belief.
Like a participant in an audience at a dramatic presentation, my sensation of this love is high intensity, at high volume, yet peaceful, without forcefulness.
So, on every occasion when I touch into my heart, I acknowledge the presence of it all over again. And of course it feels like it’s here now for the very first time!
Being thus reassured of its presence deeply inside, I put thoughts of questioning aside and get on with things.
I cannot grasp it, because it is not something I need to take or possess. Anyhow, it doesn’t have any attributes of possession.
For most of my adult life, I have navigated some fixed stars, with maxims I created, like:
“Love is the answer to which no question exists”,
“No question; answer is before”
“Summer and winter come and go
See the sense of season
Sleep naked of reason.
Old soil is new soil
In the dark seed’s eye”
What has opened in me links back to one or other of these concepts, and these in turn link back to key events and crossroads in my earlier life.
In turn, I track back along centuries of striving and surviving, trillions of gene iterations, through interstellar dust lanes hustling potential, to the beginning of beginnings.
How do you feel when you’re in love?
Your mind will take you eventually or immediately towards the object of your affection.
What has arrived in me, intense love, quenches every last residue of fear. The awareness of such love is self sustaining. It feels like perpetual motion eternally safe !
This place. This place of perpetuity, where the perception exists of itself, and in sole occupation of the heart of loving!
The only way I have to begin to describe it is to see how it belongs.
It belongs to itself alone.
At the same time, the only other two ways to express it are to sing or scream out loud like a frantic teenager, or to go share the joy, in every possible way I have learned how to, with all those who do have ears and eyes.
I worked in the garden for some hours after breakfast. It’s satisfying to see the patch of bare, sieved earth I prepared a few weeks ago now sprouting up and up! These will be the mixed Wildflowers and Traditional Meadow Grasses which I ordered when lockdown began.
Wildflower meadow seedlings
I find a lot of peace rises in me as I begin working in our little patch of green.
Today would have been the first day of Colourfest 2020. Several friends say this outdoor Dorset festival was their top favourite. They are posting warm and warming memories on Facebook.
I am rested. I find these days that if I have no physical stress, such as fatigue, my state of inner stillness comes in closer. And I only have to turn my attention inwards to feel that same butterflies in the tummy of being in love!
This was the state of being I entered, during my first experiences of Biodanza, and, with the witness of some shining soulfriends, I underwent an excavation which openly revealed my naked heart to me and to others way back in 2013, the “Year of my Life”.
I have grown to recognise this feeling of being permanently in love as a state of Grace. I am vaguely curious to find similar people who can “swap notes” about it with me. But I have begun to think that analysis or the naming of objects won’t change anything for me, nor will it show me anything new.
The state I entered into in the Year of My Life was propelled there by a number of emotional shocks or Epiphanies, which I have written up elsewhere on my EveryNow blog.
My emotional landscape is characterised by an illogical sense of continual and continuing newness.
Illogical, because a new awareness or new experience of feelings generally subsides over time, and the outlines decayed to take on the perspective of something old, of something like “been there, done that”.
There is nothing old hat about my emotional state whenever I touch into my heart and feel the love. I cannot detect anything I can refer to as, “Oh, yes those finished and tidied away things over there!”
This puzzles me when I think about it. But that’s as far as it goes when I hold it up to examine it.
In fact, the place I have reached inside I compare to the experience for a pair of good friends who are out strolling in companionable mindful wonder along an ancient forest trail. It is a wide open feeling of shared universal connection.
As the well-known saying goes from the Doctor Who series to explain the TARDIS inexplicable hyper-lightspeed time travel capabilities, “the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than the outside”.
With my most sacred space being all filled up, comes a perception of pure energy, disembodied and unrelated to spatial position. Where good fiction is made believable by a suspension of disbelief, so the sense of being in love in isolation from and absolutely removed from any object for the love, takes on the form of a belief.
Like a participant in an audience at a dramatic presentation, my sensation of this love is high intensity, at high volume, yet peaceful, without forcefulness.
So, on every occasion when I touch into my heart, I acknowledge the presence of it all over again (and of course it feels like it’s here now for the very first time!) and being thus reassured of its presence deeply inside, I put thoughts of questioning aside and get on with things.
I cannot grasp it, because it is not something I want to take or possess. Anyhow, it doesn’t have any attributes of possession.
For most of my adult life, I have navigated some fixed stars, with maxims I created. Such as:
“Love is the answer to which no question exists”,
and
“See the sense of season Sleep naked of reason. Old soil is new soil In the dark seed’s eye”
What has opened in me links back to one or other of these concepts, and these in turn link back to key events and crossroads in my earlier life. In turn, I track back along centuries of striving and surviving, trillions of gene iterations, through interstellar dust lanes hustling potential, to the beginning of beginnings.
How do you feel when you’re in love?
Your mind will take you eventually or immediately towards the object of your affection.
What has arrived in me, intense love, quenches every last residue of fear. The awareness of such love is self sustaining. It feels like perpetual motion eternally safe !
The place of perpetuity, where the emotion exists of itself, and in sole occupation of the heart of loving, the only way I have to begin to describe it is to see how it belongs.
It belongs to itself alone.
At the same time, the only other two ways to express it are to sing or scream out loud like a frantic teenager, or to go share the joy, in every possible way I have learned how to, with all those who do have ears and eyes. Exactly as I believe do you, dear Reader!
It is an odd fact, and it still doesn’t ‘reconcile’ with me, that all of the newness which arrived with my awakening opening heart in 2013, the “Year of my Life”, is still arriving unfiltered and continuing new.
Nothing seems to tarnish my outlook. No grey rime of familiarity impairs my vision of those daily events and witnessed insplashings of beauty that impact my five senses.
All is amazing, all is unique. It’s all new, and so I share.
I must share, I can’t help but share. The child on the bus who points out of the window, and says “Oh look at that!” is also helpless, unable to resist making a show, and is propelled into sharing the pleasures of surprise, when surprise overflows.
A colour, shape, pattern (I love patterns), or something I see or hear is absorbed by my senses. It is processed by my brain and my inbuilt precision engineered cogs rev up and so my heart revs up also.
When my Father referred to me at his side as his “kiddie”, I felt diminished, dismissed as less than significant. This happened even when I was a young teenager. He meant nothing by it, but how it made me fume!
Today, sixty years older, I notice I see and hear with the ears and eyes of a kiddie. For this grace of holding hands with the natural world I am wide-eyed with gratitude.
It is a way of envisioning endlessness which never even had a beginning. What happened long ago, is that I had closed my eyes to it and I had placed my obedient heart in deep freeze.
Then, at the beginning of The Year of my Life, in 2013, my hibernating heart was reached, touched directly by the pure love of others.
My excavated heart lay blinking up at me, revealed like a newborn baby, with giggles in place of disbelief!
My heart had remained for so long at my still centre, that two things happened at one and the same time.
I regained the innocent vision of Thisness, the intrinsic quality of ‘what is’. And with it, I became one with the instinctual me I call myself as an indissoluble element of the material world of which the atomic me is composed.
At the onset of such a state of bliss, my human hard-wired rational abilities of processing meaning from received sensory input were bypassed, because all my energy was drawn to my heart, which was beginning all over again to return love for received love.
My heart was like a huge motionless flywheel which had received the first motive input. The extraordinary, surprising thing is that I could see and feel it turning with beautiful gravitas, making its own delicious and unique centrifugal force of love!
That experience of extreme surprise is as real to me at this moment as it was in 2013. I have the grace of Newness never-ending.
Will it ever end?
What has, for its intrinsic quality, endlessness? To many people, the beginning of a ball of string is not visible, and so the mind tells the brain the start of the string is there somewhere. By the time the brain gets this idea, it is far far too late for the person to have come into an intimate relationship with the entirety of the stringiness and ballness of the seen object.
To be able to see endlessness as a sensation sounds far-fetched. But it is not a requirement of endlessness that it be fetched!
Why bother to go fetch what is so near as to be already in me, in you, in everything everywhere, EveryNow?
Meanwhile, listen up! Be lucky! You might just hear the ball of string softly chuckle into its roundness.
EE Cummings tells it in a poem I first read, and which still holds me with its power, from when I was only seventeen –
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth day of life and love and wings and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any-lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
The View at 72+ 