In a galaxy a long way away, I found a Palace. It was made during millions of years of evolution, and its existence was the urge to grow.
It grew away from the centre of its planet, and was admired by all who had ganglions to admire with.
The empty Palace requires a visitor, for with no witnesses, the structure exists inchoate, incomplete. With or without a witness, it crumples and melts down into the loam of its origin anyway.
It has constructed itself to be an object of desire to beings with legs or wings.
In their absence, it relies on its trillion brethren to display its message and with it to fill every space between fire and ice.
Long ago, it took the form that love takes whenever love has the opportunity to dance with atoms.
Therefore it has no need to say, “Love”.
~ ♡ 🌟 ♡ ~
[This report from an interstellar explorer was rebroadcast to its galaxy far far away, in the hope that the Palaces of Earthly Love may come to be recognised, venerated and given the status of Universal Stellar Protection by all star-system populations for all time]
AUTHOR’S FOOTNOTE
I took a photo of an unusually coloured striated garden poppy. Later that day, I enhanced it slightly, to post it on Facebook, and then the line came, “In a galaxy a long way away”.
The combined factors involved in the arrival on Earth of such a complex botanical structure are all but impossible comprehend.
My whole life I have struggled to find out how mathematics, geometry, cellular biology, phytochemistry and evolutionary botany, could affect an organism whose purpose of existence is single-pointed, and whose outward form is graceful, coherent simplicity.
A most effective and dramatic perspective I have been using for years is to pretend I have stepped off a Flying Saucer and am taking stock of an endless variety of never-seen, never-imagined Earthly life forms.
What happens when I, a creature from another solar sytem, am walking in a land of non-stop discovery?
In a flash, my perspective broadens by astronomical leaps. I am one being in a Cosmos of beings, all completely different, yet all sharing life.
My restless questions about origins, about shape, form and composition fade into a lower state of urgency. What matters is the universality of life.
My garden poppy is a messenger of life, and the astonishment is clear. Poppy exists throughout the millenia.
The manner of life’s self-assembly, of life’s urge to exist, endure, and replicate have come to me in this one flower – just for me and only at this point in time – via the operation of whole epochs of confusion, destruction and rebirth.
I have no reason to be shy to say this. It represents the result of massive recurring surges of the pure powers of love on our planet.
There is something inexplicable and unfindable in the startling grace displayed in this poppy. The grace does not require analysis or research. It simply asks of me to release all question, and to accept with childlike wonder the blindingly brilliant fact of its existence, here and now, with me
It is at least half a century since I lived the pain and confusion of the dark.
How much can I usefully contribute to comfort and encourage you in your dark time today?
In these happy years since I re-joined the Tribe, the peer group, and entered freely into open-hearted communion with like friends, I am rediscovering the world of connection as I go.
After a falling away of fruitless trying and trying, and the beginnings of acceptance had crept into and become allied with my day to day curiosity, the way out of the dark for me was to place myself in the way of making acquaintances and friendships.
It is a step which requires a certain amount of bravery. But not more than, say, deciding to run for that bus, and not just to let it drive off without me.
You are preoccupied. You may feel plagued. Stand back from the troubles inside, face outwards with curiosity and bravery.
Look to immerse your attention in person in the presence of other people’s lives, however different or trivial seeming to what you feel you are enduring.
By being a listener, by giving your precious presence, merely as a sincere witness, both you and the one on whom who you attend will be transformed. It’s not like change; it’s about transformation.
Things began to dramatically shift when I was curious enough and brave enough to join small groups with regular activities.
After about half a century, I began to notice the mirroring in other people.
Yes, the groundwork during that long time span had been prepared by travels through various powerful epiphany experiences along the way. I have set them down elsewhere on my Facebook page. Search for “epiphany” in my EveryNow blog.
All my life, I had taken it for granted that my light belonged hidden under that bushel!
I had so often played down positive comments about me, even from my Mother and Father, that I had lost interest in myself. I hardly gave my morning reflection a second glance.
I began to understand that I had no idea at all who this person I call myself actually is. It was hard to see “me” in photos of me.
I had stopped looking at my reflection in the mirror. I had reduced my image of myself so far down in importance that I had stopped taking myself into consideration.
I received a terrifying and desperate shock when I was asked to describe my very earliest happy memories. I tried to recall the face of the blissful little boy I remembered who was strolling in a flower meadow in the early 1950s.
To my horror, there was only a pale oval where my childish features should have been clear to recognise! I broke down at the realisation.
I no longer recognised the person others recognised when they saw – really saw – me.
This is not to say I never saw others. My desire to see others deeply, holistically and using all my intuition, mind and soul had always been accentuated by the ever-present ‘clouds of unknowing’ which surrounded my image of me.
Today I accept without reservation it is to some degree or other perfectly true to say we are all of us without any exceptions at all, amazing, beautiful, miraculous, even angelic beings.
Through my new found contact, sometimes very intimate contact, as in the joyful practise of regular Biodanza, I arrived at a starting point – the basic premise of which is that we are Love.
“I am Love”. Utter tosh? Wishy-washy slackness of mind?
When I first saw those words, it was in 2013. They made no sense. Read them backwards, forwards, in any order, I still thought some key word must be missing.
I was Love-blind.
I began to feel severely challenged when I tried to maintain my closed-off, shut-down, received attitude of “No not me”, which is inculcated into all of us from our earliest socialising years by wider society.
And then I surrendered!
I was obliged to stop and stand still, when I was brought face-to-face with the light of my original self by repeated “mirrorings” from new people all around me.
These were people I had begun to deeply respect. I began to see with my eyes, possibly for the first time in 66 years, the light of other people’s integrity shining with unconditional trust from their own hearts’ source.
I can never dowse the brilliant and beautiful shocking startlement of finding myself, eye-to-eye, momentarily in the shared sacred space of the heart of another!
I embraced – literally – that fact… I am Love. We are all Love.
“Go meet others” probably sounds trite. But triteness here makes it more, not less valid.
I am drawn to say that the unbearable absence of light and the terrible destructive pain of not being able to find some way of your own to fill the absence is all illusory.
Of course the pain is real. But only as real as the strength of desire aroused by the thought of eating some favourite, but unavailable delicacy.
Thoughts such as these that never lead anywhere but into the dark are an ever-present part of our human condition.
Luckily for our peace of mind and our sanity, with a minimum of training, such thoughts can be spotted as they approach, and we allow them to dissolve, long before they come too close, bite, draw blood, and embed.
If you seek the answer, do not question.
There is no question.
Nothing is buried hidden.
There is always only the answer.
What is the answer? The answer is like two children playing Hide-and-seek.
One counts to twenty, eyes closed.
When the eyes open, oh the shock! The other child never ran to hide, but stayed in front and in plain sight, grinning!
We are human.
Our hearts are not designed for loneliness and our bodies are not capable of tolerating much physical pain.
We are beings.
There is no such thing as a vacuum. No such attainable point as Absolute Zero. The reality of an atom is in an energy equilibrium composed of multiple particle-waveforms replete with unlimited potentiality in spectacular extreme motion.
So it is with us!
A being gains in sentience from other beings, starting with its ancestral origins, and all throughout life and on.
There is no meaning and there is no value in the dark whirlpool.
All any of us need in order to feel a sense of completeness is the witness of true friends. A friend, or an acquaintance with a pure heart, who knows they are constituted of love can always bring me again into the light of my original being for the simple reason that I am love.
Fly! Decide to fly.
I cannot usefully say more. Life is sparkling, ever shifting brilliance. Be dazzled. Go well
The physical universe has its own natural dignity in the general order of existence. That dignity deserves its own respect.
Reality is apparent through the detection of its magnificent spectrum of wavelengths.
Where reality ends and something else begins, possibly connected with quantum reality, or to do with the threshold of an important and blindingly beautiful stasis, is also a boundary which we are privileged to inhabit.
Nothing is black and white. Light is infinitely graduated.
So too Love.
Everything is just how it is. I come back again and again to realising that the Way of Being of whatever we attend to is entire and sufficient to itself. It is enough.
Everything is always perpetually and without exception enough.
This appreciation of Sufficiency is an expression of the way the universe loves its own witnessers. This is a love that holds and contains those gigantic primal energies science has been showing to us.
This is also the love which living organisms draw upon to go freely about their business of survival and reproduction.
The universe pours its love into all living entities, animate, inanimate, with sentience or not. It is a love which is an unending flow mirrored between the witnessers and the witnessed in equal and opposite union.
I think of this pervasive love as being like cycles of cause and effect on all possible dimensional scales and at every energy level.
There is a quality to this flow of love which is both innate and radiantly distributive, or outgoing. If this love can sense itself, it is the embodiment of a tranquility with no end.
Here is my picture of this tranquility. From those distant times in every galaxy when rocky objects began to orbit parent stars, their solid surfaces remain in a millennial continuum.
Throughout the universe there are rocky surfaces, unknown and unknowable, unconsidered and untouched by human artifact.
These rocks have no eyes to see, but their nobility is not blind.
This nobility has always existed as a starkly naked imperturbable virginity. It sings an unsung song of purest silence. As yet, not one tear has fallen on these hard places. This is the silence of an eternal home, whose roof and walls are set all about with stars that burn and shine.
The potent awareness of intense love is self sustaining. It enters my heart like perpetual motion, eternally safe! Intense love quenches every last residue of fear.
I sometimes like to call it EveryNow.
There is a final resting place for the restless mind. That place is a place of no-location. It is where safety is unconstrained by and unconcerned by time. It is a flowing source of giving. It is a not-there which is available instantly, whenever we as individuals need it.
Though we clearly feel it as being unboundaried, without limit, when our awareness is directed towards it, its quality of unconditional giving is always specific to our own heart at any given moment. Here we glimpse the uninterrupted, incorruptible unity in which everything, time, matter and energy, has its belonging.
What is the salty seawater that floats my heart high, when I’m in love?
What is it with my loudly different heartbeat, when I’m in love?
Where do my thoughts fly to, when there is no longer any room for them, because I’m in love?
What plays that harmonious chord consistently constantly in my belly, never letting me forget I’m in love?
Lovers in love hold no monopoly, conceal no closed secrets.
The love that life sparked into flame at the conception of you and me is forever in perfect readiness to be revealed, unconcealed, naked and glorious.
This life giving love is no ephemeral birthing event. It flamed but never dimmed.
These fiery penetrating flames, so characteristic of epiphany, do not self restrict to roads to Damascus.
Slow down. Stop. I turn my gaze.
It hovers one thought away, easily within hands reach.
Stare directly at naked, glorious, primal, primogenitura love.
I consider, reflect, focus and meditate on love. Strain night and day to hear the clarion of love’s battalions in mountains, streams, the ground at my feet.
Meet the love with a cocktail of witness, acceptance, humility and childlike joy.
See love’s guileless open look stand before me in the eyes of another
My grown up heart yearns to share and be a worshipping witness at the peak time seasons of living and growing.
As a toddler, I wandered with a sky full of joy in my wild little heart to discover clear and present magic all on my own, knee deep in flowering grass meadows, cow pastures, shaded ancient ditches, corn stukes, hay ricks, trickling streams, marshy pools, brackish puddles.
So many insects in my arms’ reach, all displaying such amazing colours, patterns and variety!
Every one has eyes to see with, feelers to probe, legs or wings or fins to go with, brethren to relate to.
And my first wonder as a little boy outside in the Big Green — wonder which has stayed strong with me all these days of my life — was to ask, “Who are you? What are you doing? Of what are you aware? What drives you? How alike are we?”
The answers to these primordial askables have come in precious glimpses, one at a time, like surprised butterflies on my path, all along and down my heavy decades.
These connections for me in the grasses under the sky were outside of time. They were made in heaven, and were strung like microcosmic beads along the silent, simply-furnished corridors of my childish thought between breakfast and lunch, and between lunch and teatime.
This was long before the relentless progress across the pastoral landscape, like a ghastly creeping shadow cast by no light at all, of systemic pesticides and selective agricultural weedkillers.
Here in the bliss of first contact, my love of the natural world took root. Here that child then, this white haired man now, entered into fellowship with life and sentience.
The yearning is always present. To abandon my will, and join in with the wild unselfconscious juiciness of everything that grows, moves, seeks, greets and dances life
The View at 72+ 