Tag: portal

~~~ Share the love ~~~

New is old and old is new

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.

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, completely eliminated, by a small, simple, short procedure in January 2020.

I saw relatively huge numbers of paid for “hits” on EveryNow, tens of thousands of them, compared to my ordinary Facebook likes in single or double digits. I am struck, in truth I am thunderstruck, by the complete absence of engagement from any of them, in Europe, the United States 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’. I can take a wider perspective, and be more objective than when I started out online.

I understand more than ever that my on-line presence, which has been virtually daily 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 easily visualise my self-image of Fish-Man-Me to the correct scale. Infinitesimally small. 

It’s gratifying that my blog shows signs that it’s just 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 imagined readers would report to me their reactions and new conversations might grow wings of inspiration and 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 which spiral up the charts on fire, like Catherine wheels 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. Much more importantly, 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.

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 ‘hyper’ state contributes such a lot to my desire to share the love. I do recognise it. In some form or another it’s 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! 

A portal opened for me in 2013 and it has never closed. I found a vehicle to offer to other people what I believe is most unusual and precious about what is happening on the other side of that magic door. It is the EveryNow blog. 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. I can view my life as a Pixel of Humanity.

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 joy of being simply alive, sentient and sensual, and my acceptance that this disarmingly exquisite experience of mine, of loving to live, equates to that of any other being, great or small, sentient or not.

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, a small stone ‘in the flesh’, never mind the delight of meeting with another loving, living being, animal or vegetable.

So what’s it to be? 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 Sufficient.

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

~ Love is present EveryNow

♡Epiphany the First♡ co.Tipperary, Ireland, 1977

The yellow corn was growing gold and ripely. Epiphany the First on holiday near Cahir, co.Tipperary, Ireland.

In August 1977, I crossed the threshold, the portal to an intense liberation.

Since that time I had never encountered a story that showed me I am one of many to have been smelted in a furnace of the heart and to have survived the ordeal of refinement by burning. I surely am not alone!

Since that time, I have described only to certain close friends how, over a few days and nights, the layers of self peeled away in pain and incomprehension.

~} ~} ~}

I remember walking along Exhibition Road, London and instead of the usual bland, blanked off faces of people walking past me, I became acutely aware of reading the reality of each person’s spirit in the expression on every face.

I saw many were contorted and consumed by loathing.

I saw some who were almost completely lacking in hope.

Some were intensely unhappy, as if their next facial expression was to be The Scream, ‘that’ painting by Edvard Munch. Very possibly I was visualising my own projections.

The old assumptions began to drop away from me, as if recent ghosts of my own identity were drifting off, abandoning me in ones and twos.

The assumptions of who I am are like those straight and rooted tracks on which I automatically rely for my next blink, step, next thought, next breath. I and all of us do depend on lifetime timeline assumptions without giving them a second thought. We never call them into question, unless we perceive extreme danger from an external threat or sudden inescapable challenge.

Whatever it was that had begun to move, my self-belief was evaporating, and I found myself left with fewer and fewer safe assumptions about who I was.

My friends who are my familiar friends inside of me were hurrying away somewhere else, not staying to see what happens next.

In quite a short time, as if I had no power to control the processes my spirit was undergoing, I shed my few and flimsy onion-skin layers of self-belief, until I reached a point of maximum intimacy, where the core of my being lay exposed like a small pool of white-hot molten metal resting in the base of an unmovable immutable crucible. It was painful, like active nettle-stings, but it was endurable.

I was drawn to rural isolation as the best and least threatening setting in which to preserve what I had left of me. I had no clues, no map to follow in this descent.

I bought rail and ferry tickets to Cork. I asked for bus timetables at the central London Bord Fáilte. I set out with a rigid metal frame grey canvas rucksack.

I travelled from London to County Tipperary, Ireland for a summer holiday. I knew very well I couldn’t escape from myself. But I came to rural Ireland to find a green of peace in August, because I had become afraid for my sanity. I presumed something was going to happen to me. It seemed important to give my undistracted attention to whatever it was going to be.

My next memory is of getting off the bus at the quiet stop called Cahir Cross. I walked along a reassuringly peaceful road, and I checked in to my family run guesthouse.

For safety, or rather, for self-preservation, I stayed indoors. I sat in my B&B room. I remember a pot of tea and a kindness of biscuits. I was as unprotected, fragile, brittle, as a soft bodied insect.

If I should step outside, or if I were to add to my sensory input in howsoever small a way, I might go off the edge like an untethered astronaut – lost in a mild but unending emptiness.

With a new morning, a brightly sunlit summer morning, stasis came.

Here was a still point where nothing more could happen to me. I was at the bottom of the descent, but I was not finished off.

The pain was no longer inside of me. It was not there. I remember silence.

I weep today and every time, as I recall the beauty of that silence. This silence was brand new. It was much louder inside than outside.

Silence indescribable, solid to the timid touch, had replaced pain and the frequent cramping presence of adrenaline.

I could breathe again. I could hear my breathing. I looked outwards. The yellow corn was growing gold and ripely in the small square field beyond the house. The field of gold glowed unpretentiously just outside my window. No wind moved the corn stalks baking under the blue sky.

Every ear of corn still stands there, warm in the midday heat and unmoving in my mind’s eye.

I felt an amazing, delicate, intense pleasure at seeing my host family around me, simply and quietly going about their day. I hardly dared move in case this most ordinary sweetness should crackle and dissolve.

My host family’s silent, but tangible normality was my personal reassurance. Their wordless presence was as loud as if I were being publicly baptised at the centre of a crowd.

I was filled with a soft bliss, like a person drinking after a long thirst.

The words of my drink were these:

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” [Julian of Norwich]

One thing I knew with great certainty and I would forever carry with me, that however long I live, whatever the severity of the test, I would always be able to survive.

And so I packed my rucksack to return home to the world of work and to continue with a new relationship which would culminate two years later in marriage, a new home and a family.

My awakened heart burns golden consuming nothing – in sickness and in health – from the centre to the outermost edge.

And this is the mantra I composed to celebrate the awakening:

Love is the answer

to which

no question exists

I do nothing to light the way.

The way is lit.

The way is inexpressibly beautiful always

~ Love is present EveryNow

🧱To my Friend who is in pain and perplexity🏖️

💠 To my Friend who is in pain and perplexity🔹

I truly wish my words may fill up your heart with love, dear Friend.

I remind you, you have set out courageous and have begun to confront dark barriers which old traumas and sorrows have solidified into blocks on your path.

Some of these horrid monoliths you have grown accustomed to carrying about with you wherever you go, wherever you are.

This is hard work, exhausting and lonely. There is no relief. The sad thing is, in the end, your beautiful lovable self can curl up and shrink out of sight.

And now I remind you that I still believe in Epiphany.

Being drenched by a spontaneous experience of this magnitude can take a person into a state of raised consciousness, regardless of unresolved internal obstacles.

Here is a place, a state of vibrant new awareness, where there is a continuous, powerful, conscious intuitive connection between oneself and the origin of all life.

This is a sudden inrush into the heart of life force – peace and love – from which all life springs and to which all life returns.

The heart floods with love. 
Very quickly the lovelight shows up the years, months and days lived in the shade.

Here is the source of a waterfall of Healing.

I liken this potential to enter into transformative awakening, this state of grace by an epiphany, to an arrival at a Portal, as depicted so graphically in ‘Stargate’, the sci-fi series.

However, there is a price to pay. No one steps through such a Portal casually. It takes courage and determination, sometimes born out of desperation and repeated suffering, to embark on such a rite of passage.

A person who has acknowledged and begun a journey of self-discovery, this person is unavoidably on course to rediscover the lovable, as well as the loving self.

The loving self I say, because you know you love and you have loved, and you can love. Giving such as this comes rather naturally.

Can you be loved so willingly in these familiar ways by your own self? In a nutshell, can you love yourself? 

Can you “be love” ?

Some call the opening of a significant life journey a falling in love again with the self.

“Again” because the original self “is” love. The early human baby, to whom the future has no meaning, is all about present immediacy.
This new being inhabits the space, the playground of love.

Here in this primal arena is also hunger, thirst, desire for security, in whatever order.

The reason (if such an abstraction has any meaning in the context of a newborn) why such primal needs excite us so much is simply that they sustain life.

This is life lived at no remove at all from the life instinct – the will to live, the will to continue to survive. This condition of mind is primitive, urgent, exciting.

And I say it is very beautiful. Indeed it is one of the openings into beauty.

Every sentient being on Earth – in the sea, on land, in the air – lives at this intense level.

Some time later, at the stage of independence, once the need is implanted as a result of whatever life circumstances, banal or dramatic, to discover some answers to Who, What, even Why I “am”, the path at your feet may become luminous and fertile with a rather mysterious sense of promise.

This feeling of being onto something exciting is present for the straightforward reason that there is a strong intuition that some kind of fulfilment is just round the corner.

The possibility of resolution becomes attainable, because you visualised it, called out to it, cried out for it.

All life is interconnected. All interconnections stem from one source. The source is terrific, powerful and overwhelmingly beautiful, and we hear this spoken by many from various directions from time imemorial. 

In unity, Humanity has raised its face to this millennial truth. This is how it is.

Little wonder that having stepped out on the pilgrimage to self realisation, the ground begins to tremble, and the urge to continue is irresistible. 

The stage is reached where only a hair trigger stimulus will be enough to slam the seeker into a brilliant way of seeing.

Or not! 

Epiphany experiences are in rather short supply!

It may happen little by little.
A person grows quietly into a new place of understanding and acceptance, with, “So that’s it.” With a few aha’s. 

It may happen quickly, like a dam burst. There is no avoiding, no postponing, no ignoring the approach of light, the flowering of the vision of life in grand abundance, and, with this release, laughter and the deep sense of joy-in-residence.

I so truly wish these blessings on you with all my soul’s strength, my dear Friend.

Love is present E v e r yN o w