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
The View at 72+ 