The peace I have arrived at, the peace that has arrived in me, that has ‘found’ me will not leave me for reasons of illness or misery.
Our origin is love. Our hearts are constituted out of pure love.
I came to this real understanding age 67, and I recognise this is peace that bypasses understanding.
Before I had awareness, love gave my conscious being form, much as a flame gives a candle purpose. I am now the guardian of my flame which I nourish and care for by the simple act of breathing!
Yes, all the time it feels fragile, the same way the feeling of ‘being in love’ is more delicate than any butterfly.
My experience of aliveness, though blissful, is constantly in a state of flux, connected to everything by vast rhythms and tides to places so far out of sight as to be unimaginable.
So when I try to define my life’s force in words, or dance, or music, it does not resist me, neither can it escape me, because it is me.
Oh! And it can sometimes turn towards me and light me with a smile of a beautiful person whose gaze I meet, and I am melted clean.
It may feel fragile, but fragile it is not! In everyday reality this peace I know in my heart and mind is as strong and as permanently present as gravity.
The peace is alive inside.
It is inextinguishable, simply because love is inextinguishable, and we are love.
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 🕊️
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!
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
For years I questioned how I can be in total comfort with myself? How can I be happy and my spirits be in balance?
Always these questions around introspection and self-enquiry for me.
After my very young inner child had successfully built grand defences against early trauma, the sea of companionship receded from me and I was on my own fortified island.
Marooned as the “me I call myself” long after my defences had ceased to serve their purpose, I was perpetually on an elusive quest to “catch” myself engaged fully in my most completely alive and revealing moments, at peace and in bliss.
So I feel to share again in gratitude and in simple celebration the mutual recognition of light and beauty in another, and the reflection in me.
Here, in another time of writing, is my pixel of truth as a member of humanity… ” So when I try to define my life’s force in words, or dance, or music, or art, it does not resist me, neither can it escape me, because it is me.
On rare exquisite occasions my life-force can turn towards me and light me up with a smile of a beautiful person whose gaze I meet, and I am melted clean. “
I once put this on paper…” In the intervening time since I first wrote this, I have many times over been ‘melted clean’. Every time this minor miracle happens, my heart tells me, ‘Leap for joy! Loop the loop!’ until the last remnants of grime and sludge disappear from the windscreen of my pedestrian view. “
It is when I am no longer aware of it, and have not ‘reminded myself’ to tell myself that I am happy, that the quintessence of pleasure occurs. It occurs the way a bubbling freshwater spring upwells.
And here, for many years, and indeed for my first 66 years, submission to the joy of the moment – EveryNow – remained a pretty metaphor, an intriguing glimpse of other people’s existences, but never my own.
My route to arrival (in part) at EveryNow was through my furious and repeated focus over an extended period of years on these two puzzles.
What constitutes the bliss that so utterly takes “me” over? And where am “I” at the moment I vanish and become “become” bliss?
Again… what is the experience like to completely “be” someone else? Put in other words, what is it to fully present my own self with the pure distillation of the sentience of another living sentient creature?
By engaging myself in this roller-coaster thought-ride, centrifugal force may fling me off. It is just one of the many ways to lose myself and find the world.
If I care to think on it, this is the best endeavour of all of my powers of understanding and intuition set to the task of vanishing as being me, and to entering into the sacred presence of the essential essence of another. Another man, woman, tree, even a stone!
Less is so much more that it defies description!
And it is this lack of definitive Definitions, this willingness of mine to take the courage of my own spiked curiosity, in the absence of labelling intentions, that brings me to see there are two things which have meaningful existence: Peace and Love.
Love is the child of Light and Peace.
What makes all the foregoing worthwhile and valid? These two: Peace and Love. Peace and Love are qualities which together constitute my heart, my most sacred personal space.
And I have a simple practical way to find myself whenever I am in need, feel troubled, restless or lost.
The reality for me of the existence in me of Love and Peace is not just a chunk of factual knowledge that I can refer to.
Through thick and thin, illness, despair, literal clinical madness and the mayhem of chaos, I know for sure I need only look inwards.
I only need touch into this heart of mine with a smile in order to reignite my entire panoply of reasons to be alive and to continue to live.
Instantly I am driven to raise and praise these qualities and make them known and shared far and wide.
A blade of grass has no looking-glass. It is not green by reason of it absorbing all colours but green.
A grassblade is an abstraction of beauty in a pure material form. It is so and not further.
Night or day, in every grass-blade there is a blinding-bright beauty detonating in total silent anonymity.
Only allow that beauty to enter, to penetrate your heart, and, exactly because you are more actively constructed and construed than a blade of grass, you are able to see, to experience with your conscious awareness the glorious Sufficiency of You in all your innate beauty and latent power.
When that occurs, inspiration, the lack of it, pain, or the lack of it, in fact all states or stages of being in life click into their own place.
That place is where time began and ends. Where love and peace pertain. Like the Tardis, it is a LOT bigger on the inside than on the outside!
. . .
And the maelstrom of moments in which our beauty dances, exists as EveryNow.
“Love is the thread which weaves the empty sky with birdsong
When I write, I am representing in one way or another a self-similar fragment of the brilliance of the peace and love we all come from and to which we all return.
The brilliance reveals itself here, under the next leaf, there beneath the water’s ripple. It is behind old grief, and it is always always always after my next blink. It is EveryNow!
“Peter,” you say,
“You are defo in the zone of Zen.”
Yes, maybe so.
You are the one who says so about me. It is not just the me you see. It is you who says you see.
Whatever the zone is, even if the zone is ignored, denied, unsuspected or invisible under examination, it is you, it is I, it is ineradicably eternally in you and in I.
Because it shines in all sentient beings, and because all sentient beings take shape and form from all things, the zone of Zen you say you see is as much in and of you as it is of me and of EveryThing.
We all return to the brilliance of the peace we come from and the heart of love which animates and sustains us.
The brilliance is here for me to see in every blink and breath. It behoves me to remind you of it in the words I say and in the glance I cast.
If love is present EveryNow, due attention ought to be drawn to its brilliance – a splendour which touches us every one deeply, if we know it, or if we know it not!
The peace I have arrived at, the peace that has arrived in me, that has ‘found’ me will not leave me for reasons of illness or misery.
Our origin is love. Our hearts are constituted out of pure love.
I came to this real understanding age 67, and I recognise this is peace that bypasses understanding.
Before I had awareness, love gave my conscious being form, much as a flame gives a candle purpose. I am now the guardian of my flame which I nourish and care for by the simple act of breathing!
Yes, all the time it feels fragile, the same way the feeling of ‘being in love’ is more delicate than any butterfly.
My experience of aliveness, though blissful, is constantly in a state of flux, connected to everything by vast rhythms and tides to places so far out of sight as to be unimaginable.
So when I try to define my life’s force in words, or dance, or music, it does not resist me, neither can it escape me, because it is me.
Oh! And it can sometimes turn towards me and light me with a smile of a beautiful person whose gaze I meet, and I am melted clean.
It may feel fragile, but fragile it is not! In everyday reality this peace I know in my heart and mind is as strong and as permanently present as gravity.
The peace is alive inside.
It is inextinguishable, simply because love is inextinguishable, and we are love.
I am 100% certain of my own death. I am ignorant of the time when I will die.
So now what choices are left to me?
Quietly stated, I can choose to open my heart to love my fellow journeyers and to honour the life flame which expresses itself as the one I call me.
I can turn to face up to myself, and sharpen and hone my acute awareness of my body and my mind with every breath and heartbeat.
I can close my inner eye and in the dark I can feel the hearts beat of all my loved ones – family, friends, of every single one whose path has crossed and touched mine.
My ancestors make themselves known to me in the living, working. expressions of my body, and in the inheritance of my capacity for thought.
I can give thanks for choices without end.
Principally, I have the ability to bend towards all who have made reality of my existence.
My gratitude is in the immediacy of every instant my blood and my flesh support my survival. My bloodline is a small drop in a chartless oceanic journey of blood lines.
Love is the bed of our moving blood ocean.
I am at peace in a storm of fiery life!
I am overflowing with gifts none of which I created, but all of which arise from the mystery of peace from which my compassionate heart flames into life.
The View at 72+ 