It’s only been a few days,
but I’m back for more.
The life of an addict.
My moments have become cracked glass,
but there is a hint of honey in my tears.

It’s been
a bittersweet epiphany:
I’m not cut out
to be the person
I’ve been being.
I’m a crash test dummy
careening into the wall
of nothing whatsoever.

For a moment
I was full and clear,
a moment without the traffic,
unfettered,
remembering
what he told me,
hugging it close to my chest,
wanting to tell complete strangers about it,
holding it up to the sky
from time to time
like the negative image
of the moment when
everything had changed for me.

But then I failed
to meet the deadline
and they were disappointed.
The sole of my
right shoe split open,
and the guest speaker
told me how she
was fighting every day
to save the rest of us
from our own destruction,
which seemed staggeringly
meaningful,
and the teacher
encouraged me to take
a more effective stance
in my child’s future,
and they forgot
to put the dressing
on the side,
and I was spoken to again
about my grasp
on the situation.
Or lack thereof.
Wouldn’t I have thought
someone in my position
would have realized
what was happening?
And so here I am.
Trembling a tad.
Flowing.
Holy.
Ready.
I need this.

The thing is:
I’ll never live up to myself.
That type of suffering
will set you free.

Jesus meets my gaze,
holds a finger to his lips
to seal this pact of silence,
then decides to wash my hair.
Afterwards we sit
at the little table
by the back porch
and I empty my pockets
of the crumpled scraps of paper.

He helps me spread them flat
on the table.

good
accepting
reliable
happy
responsible
inspired
loving
kind
helpful
trustworthy
vulnerable
deserving

We examine them together.
I’m getting anxious.
This is the hard part.
Where I give one up.
One at least.
He’d take them all if I let him,
but the thought alone is crushing.
It’s all I have left… these aspirations.
The life of an addict.

He wants me to run on empty.
He wants my face to be a mystery.
So lizards will stop chewing
when I stumble past,
and wonder,
Where’d that come from?
He does…
He.
He?
This.
This heart of mine
that understands me perfectly
and keeps trying to let me in on the secret.

A little over a week ago Linda nominated this blog for an award, and being Award Free here I graciously declined but expressed my appreciation for the recognition.  Linda’s intent was clear and heartfelt, however, and revolved around expanding relationships and the threads of connection in this virtual realm.  I felt I wanted to honor the intention in some fashion.  So, I’ve been thinking since then off and on about relationship in general, and the role it plays in releasing the creative power within us.  Having witnessed a number of persons in my limited sphere of awareness facing difficulties that seem intractable, Linda and myself included (though in what seem like very different ways), it seems a worthy topic to explore.

There’s a phrase that appears with increasing frequency as one moves through A Course of Love: unity and relationship.  This jab-jab-hop…POW! is not only the means of accessing and expressing the power native to our being, but the most profound outcome as well.  Like all good paradoxes, this phrase expresses a wholeness that seems to have two incompatibly shaped faces.  One side is square.  The other is round.  And yet it’s a single coin.

The coin is tossed high into the sky.  Call it!  Square or round?

Square.

(Lands.  Square side up.)

Square it is.  Do you kick or receive?

Both.

Perfect.  Off you go then.

Without unity, we are like a disassembled engine.  A lot of parts twirling each other around and trying to figure out how we snap together.  The worlds that stymie us are the ones where the parts have each decided to be an engine all of their own.  Having come from engine, they know the power of engine.  Knowing the power, they think they can bring it forth.  They remember it.  They feel it.  But without reassembly, there is only frustration.  No part can achieve independently, what already and only is.  So yeah…  Unity.

I think it’s important to bear in mind that Unity is the power itself, before it became the engine.  Unity is the power that was always there.  Unity is the power that can never be touched.  As well, unity is meaningless without relationship.  It doesn’t stand on it’s own in Creation.  Without relationship, unity is everything at once, undifferentiated and nonexistent.  And there can be no exchange this way.  No movement.  No expression.  Unity is not relationship but nor is it fully separable from it.

To have an engine, you need parts, and to have parts working in connection, you need differentiation.  You need valves and wires and cylinders and tubing.  You need belts and gears and pulleys and a computer.  But if you have all that, the relationships between them allow power to flow.  (Everything in it’s right place.  See footnote below.)  The relationship too, is not quite what it appears, because it is also invisible.  It is not really separate from unity.  Relationship binds each to each, it doesn’t merely connect one guy to the next guy.  Relationship isn’t about how many beings you rub up against if you swing your arms.  All to all and each to each are contained in the invisible, timeless field of relationship.  Each part of that whole engine emerged from the invisible, pure, audacious power of the formless engine.  Directly.  From unity.  Each part has access to the whole idea and power of the engine, not just to a little piece of it.  And yet each part expresses uniquely in the manifest realm as the power is made manifest.

But the world we experience on a daily basis is one where the parts aren’t quite set up properly, or so it seems.  One idea I find mind-blowing is that our suffering is itself a type of wholeness.  It’s a strange notion, but it makes some sense to me.  We like to resolve our suffering into particular “issues”, and then solve them.  This is how we think when acting and responding as separate beings.  We think everything is separable.  We think everything can be broken into manageable pieces and tackled.  We think there is an isolable cause– one and only one cause– for each difficulty.  I’ve come to view this as far too simplistic.  Our suffering, too, is whole.  It affects us in our entirety.  We’re not just broken in specific facets of our lives, we’re broken everywhere.  Suffering is simply a distortion of wholeness, and I think we can see that when we finally are overwhelmed by it.  Then it’s everywhere-at-once nature becomes more tantamount.

Everything sucks all together.

Then Hafiz walks through the room like a one-man marching band, playing seventeen instruments at once.  A finely polished kazoo.  A belt of tambourines.  And a harmonium.  And the break, if it comes, breaks through everywhere.  We can’t find ourselves at all…  We’re gone…  But we’re alive in relationship with all that is…

I love the sentiments of A Course of Love.  I need the release of the power described therein.  I need to be honest about this.  The cessation of suffering isn’t a nice-to-have.  If your suffering has temporarily reached the ludicrous zone, the breakthrough is probably marching right now around the granite walls you’ve built around your heart.  In seven days time, the walls will come tumbling down.  Things will snap together.

I feel close to the sun, and there’s the sensation: you either dissolve into a gentle, living warmth, or you burn to a crisp.  There’s a phase change to my being that I both desire and sense is proximate, but before it is complete it feels like the wheels may fall off.

That’s okay.  Hafiz is a good band.  Worst case I carry the sheet music for him.

Unity and relationship.  Linda was onto something.  If you’re scrambling to pick up the pieces, you’re in good company.  Remember your part has a unique little widget function thingamajig that no other part quite has, and it’s needed to make the redacto-flux-wave guide-dip tube function properly.

But your part is also everything.

Thank you for that.

Footnote:

I’ve been thinking lately about things I have no business thinking about, like how to reconcile the capital-‘S’ Self from A Course of Love with what I’ve glimpsed of the Buddhist teaching of anatta, or no-self.  Let me say right at the outset that this is not purely an intellectual exercise.  One of the great miracles of starting this blog has been the dialogue with people whose words, and possibly (though it remains hard to say conclusively) their points of view, may differ subtly from my own.  The question of whether or not we really differ in points of view needs no answer, for friendship does not require such clarity, relying instead and far more beautifully upon the careful offering of gifts to one another– gifts that are pulled out from that sacred mystery that both links and stands between.  The gap, perceived or real, is also sufficient to compel reflection, which leads to the discovery of one another, and to insight.  For these, I am grateful to each one of you who have engaged me here.

Much has been said and continues to be said about non-duality, the existence and/or non-existence of an eternal self, the existence of a soul, of a little-‘s’ self, an ego, a capital-‘S’ Self, and so on and so forth.  I really like this article that comes up when you do a web search on the Buddhist doctrine of no self, because it suggests the question did not lend itself to a meaningful answer the Buddha could offer, and that he may have chosen not to muddy the waters with needless arcana that don’t need to be understood in order to provide us with a path out of suffering.  I like this answer because it is helpful to me.  Every time I try and understand the mechanics of phenomena over my pay grade, I end up suffering.

Having said that, I am going to delve into two inter-related nuances of this topic I have found it important to wrestle with, and from which a smoothing of experience has begun to emerge.  There is a way in which I’m holding in my heart a finding–one that I will suggest is becoming a new home.  As background, my understanding of the Buddha’s teachings is that their primary aim is to assist us in perceiving correctly, such that we might end, or at least be relieved from, our suffering.  (I do not mean to disrespect through over-simplification, so feel free to shed light on this thought in the commentary below.)  I find that this is true of the many forms in which non-dual teachings are offered, and also feel this was in some respects the principal aim of A Course in Miracles, which has been described by some as a non-dual teaching dressed up in particularly Christian or theistic guise.

The first half-crazy notion I would like to offer is that while there is a time and a place for teachings on the escape from suffering, such a time will pass.  We should, in fact, be thankful this is inevitably so.  Both individually and collectively, suffering will cease.  It is not a question of if, but when.  And if we view the cessation of suffering as an accomplishment– though not an accomplishment of a fictitious or transitory self– we can see that life on the far side of it is likely to be radically different in emphasis and practice than life on the near side.

A key tenet of A Course of Love is acceptance that we are the accomplished, which means we are not beings in need of anything beyond what we’ve been given in order to fully embody and express the deepest truths of who we are.  What’s been missing has been the recognition that this is so, and thus the expression.  We’ve been missing.  We haven’t shown up.  But who exactly has been missing?  And who is it that has been subject to the seeker’s condition of suffering?

I ask you to bear with me a moment while I wander.

While I do not know if the same is true of other paths such as Buddhism, the teachings of Jesus I have found most helpful– such as A Course in Miracles, Dialogue on Awakening, the Way of Mastery, and most recently A Course of Love– have contained a certain progression.  There is movement within them– a direction if you will.  Their emphasis shifts as the healing progresses.  I experience this direction as the calling to return to our authentic and natural place within the singular cosmic act of Creation.  This return is the end of suffering, for suffering is itself the result of separating from this cosmic, holy and endless movement.  This separation is made most manifest in the trumping up of a misplaced identity– what we often call the ego– which would like to appropriate the full rights and privileges of Creation itself for its very own.  It’s a great idea, until one discovers it simply doesn’t work.

Clearly this unanswerable question of identity is bound up deeply in both the onset of suffering, and its ending.  The most recent teachings from Jesus with which I am familiar are contained in A Course of Love, and they feel like a bridge from one side of this divide to the other.  Their stated purpose is to speak directly to the heart, bypassing the mind and all of its tangled trespassing upon the ineffable, so that we might recover and then move on to the expression of our true identity.  According to A Course of Love, it is this healing of misplaced identification that not only ends suffering, but releases our true power as integral nodes of Creation.  We become, in other words, actively present.  We show up.

If the ego is gone, as it surely is at this point, who or what remains?  Who exactly is now showing up?

I am not going to be so bold as to offer an answer I do not have, but the particular approach taken in A Course of Love has been very helpful to me in achieving a comfortable insight that I can live from.  I’ve found it is not an idea that I’m always referring to my mind to clarify for me every time I wish to feel its presence, but rather an easy, flowing comprehension.  This idea is that we share an identity in Love.  At our very root, we are the same.  We can see this in one another if we look for it.  We can see the Love that peeks out through every pair of eyes, every creature, every stone, every blade of grass…  Thus, our ultimate identity, the one that never changes, is Love, and it is one we share.

We feel this identity at the point of our going forth, at the point of our mutual differentiation, which is our heart.  And yet this sameness does not require that we turn in our guns of distinctness and individuality.  We arise uniquely as differentiated expressions within Creation, and the heart is our tether to what is the same in all of us: everything.  Whether as differentiated beings we have permanent souls or not, I don’t know.  The recognition that we share an identity in Love, and that Love desires to express itself indefinitely and unabashedly through an ensemble of distinct beings who may or may not at all times manifest physically has made this point moot for me.  It simply doesn’t matter.  It is not the case that I lack a “self”, however, by which I mean an identity.  I’m not nothing at all.  Who I am is as close to me as me.  It is my heart.  Whenever I need a reference point for who I am, it is there.  It is not something I can define very well, or into whose cosmic mechanics I can offer any particular insights.  It is enough to know that the experience within me which is closer to me than me, which is most natural and free, is safe, endless, and true.

I don’t know if I have a self, or a Self, or neither.  But I have an identity.  It is vast and seemingly without boundary.  And it is not an impostor.  I know this because whenever I truly see another through my heart, they feel like me.  This identity is reinforced by universal recognition.  Somehow, the greatest gift we offer to one another is the manifest experience of the identity we share.  Increasingly, I feel this identity returned to me everywhere that I look, and so oddly enough, even a well-placed wall of stone can engender the sublime experience of who I am.

Hafiz picked me up
and drove me out into the countryside,
aiming the right front tire
for every mud puddle he could find,
and filling the rearview mirror
with volley after volley of clay starbursts.

Then, much to the relief
of both my kidneys and
the vehicle’s suspension,
we came across a dog breeder
and popped in to say hello.
After a cup of tea
and a profound discussion
of canine nutrition,
she invited us to see the stock.
We stepped outside
and she whistled like an old school
basketball coach.
All the little pups came running.
They lined up in a row
and plopped down on their
well-trained haunches,
head up, chest out, and eyes wide.
As we went down the line
they smiled ear to ear
like they couldn’t stand it anymore
and made puppy growls and yips
and bounced in place or fell over sideways
and licked our hands and knee caps
and lifted their front paws to touch us
and whined with the delight of being near
and created a small dust storm
with their flapping tails
until our own hearts felt like
they were going to burst.

But then there was one
down on the end, off to the side,
with narrow eyes like chiseled stone,
fixed and unmoving,
like he was a sentry posted
outside of Caesar’s spear closet.
He wore a mask with an elastic strap
to which there was attached
a tiny, pointed granite beak.
Also a harness from which there hung
a pair of wing-like contraptions.
His tail was hidden by a fan
of discarded feathers from various songbirds,
and he made little high-pitched squeals
out of the side of his mouth
the way a ventriloquist would,
from which I intuited the muffled cries
of a would-be falcon.

The owner shrugged her shoulders
and made a dismissive wave of her hand.
There’s one in every litter, she explained.

I wanted so badly to tell this one
about all of the beauty and promise
I saw behind that macabre ensemble of props,
how there was so much joy hidden behind that mask,
but when I put my compassionate hand close
to touch his head, he made one of those squeaks
I was just mentioning to you
and then tried to peck a hole through me
with the business end of that strap-on beak.

Hafiz leaned in to whisper something in my ear.

Don’t even say it, I said,
still smarting from the little bastard’s assault,
holding up my hand like a traffic cop,
and thinking of smacking Hafiz one
right in the shoulder
if he got any closer
with that ha-ha twinkle in his eye.
I know I know… I said…
(rolling my eyes)…
that’s how I look
to the Beloved when I go around all day
acting like a very serious man.

He chuckled.

What I was going to say, he offered,
is that falcons don’t particularly enjoy
being patted on the head,
but you might offer him a piece
of this bloody steak instead.

So I did.

He flipped his toy beak up
like a jeweler’s lens
and pecked the meat right down,
then went back to his
razor-like vision,
though unable to totally suppress
a devilish twitch of his tail.

On the way home
Hafiz put the top down
and our newfound friend sat in the backseat
on a stack of old books
with his tongue dangling in the breeze
and his wings cranked out either side
to their maximum extents,
their pasted on feathers shimmying in the wind,
his eyes wide and watery,
and in his heart…
he was

flying…

I’m not so naive as to think I fully understand my own beliefs and feelings, nor to assume they form an exactly rational system when laid bare by attempts at explanation.  But in making the effort, I discover things– inconsistencies in thought, many of them delightful(!); powerful feelings that cannot be explained, yet explain much; ineffable inner realms I realize are part and parcel to who I am; or the existence of ideas operating one level deeper within me than the level I set out to explain.  I discover, or at least contact, who I am, and by extension, who we are.

As an example, consider this treasured, albeit potentially indefensible conviction I hold, that the world is quite capable of behaving in ways not reconcilable with the past.  Equivalently stated, I believe my library of personal experience is a woefully inadequate indicator of what exists within the landscape of the possible.  Both of these statements efforts to describe a feeling I have in my heart.  It is a feeling that beckons to me from the unknown.  It is a feeling that something very real exists, right now, but not yet fully within the present frame of manifest experience.

Is this crazy?

Then I am happy to be called such.

Feelings are powerful resonators, and they call forth ideas that seem capable of elaborating on their contents.  Giving these ideas life can quite often seem an impossible task, however, particularly when they represent departures from past precedent, and it is at this point in the chain reaction of creation and consequence that one reaches an impasse.  It is as if an uncrossable divide appears in our way.  How does one reach across the gap from one frame to the other, from what is felt to what is apparent?

* * * * *

When I was in college I discovered the ideas of John Keely.  To some, he was construed as a crackpot and a fraud.  To others he was a genius.  One premise latent in his work is that every structure in the universe– from the smallest particle to the greatest galaxy– participates in a dynamic flow of harmonious forces that may be “sprung open” at any point in space, just as a field of invisible white light is capable of being released into a rainbow of visible colors on its passage through a drop of water.  These forces, once released, seek ever to return to their natural state of hidden balance.  The Earth and the Sun, as examples, are like two drops of that water, fulcrums of power who each spring open the cosmic reservoir, releasing forces who flow continuously from each to each in their yearning for balance.  It is as if a limitless field of neutral magnetic potential were torn in two points, creating a pair of openings, and those two openings were linked to form a continuously flowing circuit.  Thus, through relationship and mutual arising, a dynamic, but seemingly stable form emerges.

So far the story sounds rather like an impressionist, nineteenth century rendition of electrodynamics, in which electrons are bound to the nucleus of atoms by passing the electromagnetic force back and forth.  One of Keely’s distinctions was that he felt the human being was also such a drop of water, and he came to realize that the human being could “awaken” these forces in earthen materials.  Two examples from stories surrounding Keely’s legacy will reveal what is meant by this.  In one story, Keely placed copper spheres at various points in his laboratory, and by preparing them in ways that remain beyond concise explanation, he was able to cause them to form a miniature “solar system”.  They floated in orderly circles through the air of his laboratory just as planets float through the space around the sun.  In a second example, he constructed a large copper sphere that he “geared” to the existing circuitry of the Earth and Sun.  When activated, the sphere would rotate, just as a planet does, and would do so regardless of resistance applied to it– e.g. leather straps linked to really heavy objects.  He is said to have intended to apply this invention to the rail system, eliminating the need for dangerous steam engines in trains.

The insight, the mojo in all of this is said to have been love– whatever that is…  Keely is said to have initiated his experiments by playing a violin and using music as a carrier of his heartfelt knowing-feeling.  To simplify– temporarily eschewing the notion that the stories are simply absurd, because the feeling I have would suggest this isn’t necessarily so– Keely’s legacy suggests that love can awaken relationship, causing new circuits to form in the natural world through which harmonizing forces will flow.  I found this idea nearly intoxicating, and still do.

* * * * *

At this earlier time in my life, roughly fifteen years ago, I participated in a group of roughly twenty to thirty persons– (at our peak, though at times we were just two or three)– who had come together in an effort to recreate this phenomenon.  We failed to reproduce any physical reenactments of these stories, but the particular mode of failure did not really dampen my feeling that far more is possible than history would suggest.

One thing I learned was that I needed a result too badly.  I was desperate, hungry, and splintered within.  I was, truth be told, as scared of success as I was of failure.  I thought I would be different if events went a particular way, and I now realize how deeply erroneous this type of thinking is, and was.  I sensed this inherent cosmic braking system at work within me at the time, but I desired to somehow push through my littleness.  If we could invent light bulbs and space stations, why could we not research our way forward to this?  It was such a good dream.  Though the message we were given was that healing and love would need to precede any of the spectacular outcomes we envisioned, I was impatient, and I was pained at times by the handicaps of my own shortcomings.

I could see no real path forward, and the effort fell apart, but I decided to take the medicine.  I realized I would need to be free of projecting my wholeness onto specific forms, free of needing specific outcomes, and that what I needed above all else was to become a reservoir of peace and contentment with however life arrived.  In other words, I could apply this feeling of possibility to all that has already arisen, and thereby eliminate the gap.  What lies beyond the gap remains to be seen and experienced, but remains out of reach so long as one’s current field of experience is seen as broken.  What I think I understand deeply now is that the path to the new involves the transformation of our experience of what already is.

Removing the obstacles to one’s awareness of Love’s presence is the temporary purpose of life.  When the process is completed, it is no longer needed.  Rational or not, I accept this to be so, and I remain convinced of the validity of the feeling I have that beyond the embodiment of this realization there lies all sorts of beautiful possibilities.  Keely may have been a genius, or he may have been a crackpot.  We may never know definitively.  It doesn’t really matter at this point.  My path led to here…  I am pregnant with an idea of open-endedness I cannot shake, and I am protecting this child within me from the conclusions of history.  We whisper to one another at night, about all that we are becoming, and I find in each day emerging evidence of all that truly is.

I read an article the other day
about some people
who did what all the books
said to do
and they were explaining
in very simple terms
how now their every movement
opens up before them
like a strawberry shortcake snack
at the Center for Incredibleness
and their every breath
brings with it some beneficent manifestation
like a phone call from some Swiss lawyer
representing a great uncle
they never knew they had
who made some fine investments in railroad steel
a century or two ago, then was lost tragically
in a hot air balloon disaster along with
most of his immediate relatives,
which meant it fell upon the
shiny happy ones from the article
to inherit
and manage
a hefty assortment of waiting monies.

Hafiz was staring with equanimity
at my wilting peperomia plant,
which I leveraged as an opportunity
to add neglectful to the growing list
of obvious flaws I would
one day need to surmount
in order to manifest
unsolicited telephone calls
from foreign barristers.

“Your great uncle died, too, you know.”

Yes, I know that.
Did he not think I knew that?

Then, while Hafiz watered my peperomia plant
in a very beautiful way,
a way I could probably never manage
in this lifetime,
a way that made my eyes water
and my chest swell up
with all the grieving I had never completed
for that great uncle I never met,
I looked at my own list of life circumstances.

I could see no strawberry shortcake snacks
laid out in a buffet line before me.
I could see, instead,
a phone call that needed to be made
to a disappointed client,
a sketch of an apple I had tried to make
that looked instead like a crepe
left out in the sun too long,
and a fresh sriracha stain on my favorite shirt.
I felt as if the past several decades
of sitting quietly beside lit candles
early in the morning or late at night
and listening to the hidden meanings
of my own breath had been a futile postponement
of the obvious conclusion: I was broken.

Hafiz came over and sat beside me.
He lit a candle and together we breathed
some air in and out for a little while,
resting in one another
back and forth
like ancient waves finally finding their shore
until there was only the sensation
of spaciousness and the sound of
two bodies breathing.

Then I retired for the evening.

I dreamed about a sea of faces
stretching in all directions
like pebbles strewn across the beach of history,
and of all of the countless teeth they had grown–
a ga-jillion perfect bones–!
every one of them incomprehensibly
arising in its rightful place.

The next morning my peperomia
was spread full and alert,
and I realized I was a holy tooth
nestled quietly
in the song-filled mouth
of Love.

We were all in there together,
lined up and gleaming,
and the whole world
around us was busily
blowing
kisses…

For the past six weeks I’ve been entrenched in the birth throes of an industrial project, feeling myself slowly succumb to its eye-dimming cocktail of fatigue and necessity.  I’ve been watching myself sigh in the hallway, crack jokes over the intercom, eat meals with forks unable to spear anything that wasn’t already mashed, and enter a stupor of gratitude when the person beside me stepped out of the darkness carrying a solution– something half-corroded with wires hanging off the side that just five minutes previous had been rescued from the enduring anonymity of a scrap pile.

We pressed buttons and touched screens still protected by their factory-applied films, and nothing happened.  We pursed our lips.  Nothing-at-all was to be our most relevant data point.  We examined the bifurcating field of plausibility in which we stood, and then checked the fuses.  We re-discovered switches and disconnects we’d already taken for granted.    Electronic devices that we contacted for answers failed to report for duty, or if pressed upon, produced streams of nonsense.  We jumpered them out.  Shut them up.  Listened to what remained.  Then we reconfigured them.  We hooked up new wires to check on the old ones, and we stared dead-eyed into the inanimate faces of gauges, with tarps whipping in the wind beside us, wondering which of us was the liar.

Deep in the night, in the fissile period between midnight and the first scent of dawn, an hour or two before the daily onslaught of commuting machines, birds with voices like squawking check-marks hijacked the nearby bridge, filling the air with their signatures.  They claimed it as their own.  Reveled for a moment in the glory of who they are and have always been.  Remembered, like we did as children, when we sneaked through the neighbor’s garden with our eye-patches, capes and plastic swords.  For that moment, that window of time, the wind, the seashells and the tree-tops tucked along the water belonged to those birds again, as they had for countless generations of their forebears.

An hour or so later, a shift change.  We were back on the scene, laughing about Murphy and Occam, buckling our overmatched forks against carrots and deep-fried chicken pieces the color of breast cancer awareness.  We cursed– not at events themselves, but at our collective fall from grace.  Same as the birds.  Same as the car horns, the whistling factory alarms clogged by dust, and the banging together of rail cars down on the tracks.  All of it sounded the same, like a face you keep seeing in the crowd.  Somewhere in all of this there was something we’d lost.

Somewhere.

* * * * *

As the one so appointed, I gave progress briefings each morning, and was called upon at various times to explain how this or that phenomenon could have happened.  We thought you would have known better, they said.  Couldn’t this have been avoided?  It’s important that we all understand the root cause, because none of us can afford for this to happen again.  None of us.

The imponderable weight of commerce bound us all together.

The night before, fifteen hours into a shift laced with an aromatic white-out of curing insulation and refractory, we’d discovered the meaning of a particular resinous vapor.  A cloud of smoke had suddenly emerged, pouring out of somewhere it shouldn’t have been.  Fire alarms in the next building had triggered.  We’d shut it all down.  We’d been on the verge of real progress– had been spinning at twenty-six thousand rpm for several hours– but now the end was in jeopardy.

Only two weeks left, and something you don’t walk into a store and buy had been reduced to ash.

Yes… the root cause…

Once you find and correct the root cause of a particular phenomenon, it should never happen again.  Never mind that all of this– all of this– is simply what separation feels like, that every splinter of experience is an instant replay of the choice we once made together to try things out alone.  The birds clamoring under the trestle, the criss-crossed wires, the inscrutable gauges, the gaps in logic, the inadequate accommodation of the unexpected.  The uncertainty, weighted by fatigue, weighted by millions of somebody else’s dollars tied to a particular, rapidly approaching spot on the calendar.  This is simply how separation feels.

Thankfully, it’s never unattended, this separateness that’s only a costume.  Underneath, there’s always the grace.  The way a side conversation steered us away from danger.  The way we found what we needed when we most needed it.  The way someone unbidden stepped in to fill the gap.  The way logos and branding eventually failed to matter, and blurred into something eminently more human.

It’s only afterwards that we see it: the way we gather together sometimes with our check-marked voices to cry out to one another, to rankle, to fester together and wear down upon our shared necessity, to get down to the bottom of it.

To remember.

Peace taken up by the flesh has a rhythm to it.  A field of frozen grass and falling snow, mixed with true inhabitants, will ripple with tongues of steam.  Life will move in and out of itself, and possibilities will disperse from their smoky origins, drift into the branches of trees at the field’s edge, and nestle into nooks beneath the boughs.

We share a breath that’s always breathing– here and there and all at once– a breath that snuck into itself and made a circle, and then snuck into itself and made a circle, and then snuck into itself and made a circle.  We share a breath that claims every face as her own, every emptiness as one of her dwellings.  She presses against our root, drawing everything near, and pauses for a moment, losing her every distinction into our silence.  Then we give her back, and she washes out all the way to distant shores, exposing the silt of our dreams.  Steam fills the air and sparkles as it cools into ash, while a trace part of us is carried even farther beyond, to every point of the sea.  Rising and falling with the water.

Sometimes we like to think otherwise, but when we are at peace we understand that it is the nature of our being to erode bit-by-bit until we mix with everything, touch everything, and mingle with every shore.  Our concentration is a gradient without a boundary– a swirling, scattering pattern of breathing. We are loci of a swaying proximity to everything.

When we stop seeking, this is what we find: the world is breathing us.  And we are breathing the world.  Each time it looks the same– a billowing cloud of white gases that billow and spin and vanish, fading back into the greater breath– but every time it’s also a little different.  The world hinges on subtleties contained in our breath.  That is how the world moves.  Every time the wave of this great breathing washes into us, symbols and stories mix, and a little more of what will be dissolves.  The shorelines of our silence erode and become fluid.  The dye of our beauty is released.  Circles inside of circles inside of circles– we are the points of contact with a vast and hidden continent.  We are the caves in which the breath we share once hid its secrets.

And we keep wondering who we are.  We keep wondering what we mean and what we can be, when what we can be was already given.  We have already been deposited in endless glaciers of rock, and they are slowly dissolving into the water.  It simply takes the action of our breathing to shake us loose.  It takes the breath that’s happening everywhere.  And listening to it.  We are the bellows of world-building, and the grains that wash out of us with every silent tide are our prayers– wordless particles that mix together in the sea.

I think it takes a while to learn that loving isn’t a skill we learn– that no one can be more or less loving.  We can only get out of the way.  We can only keep breathing in synchrony with the breath that is breathing us, with the breath that is climbing into every being for a look and then climbing back out into the sky as something else altogether.  We can only give ourselves to it, so that our prayers have a little of everyone in them, so that our circle can live inside of other circles, that live inside of other circles, that live inside of a breath that’s always breathing.

Our dear friend Hariod asked me after my last post what the word miracle means to me, and as I thought about how to answer I realized my response would very quickly get out of hand in the post commentary.  Hence this post.  It’s a question I savor answering because I don’t quite know how I’m going to do it.  I have a feeling about what I wish to say, but the closer I get to the center of it, the more delicious the dead reckoning becomes.  It’s a bit like holding a black hole in your hand and attempting to point out its properties with a laser pointer, then seeing something interesting– what the–? and peering closer, then closer, then falling in…

The word miracle has come to occupy a similar place within my psyche as the word God.  They’re both so muddled by the baggage of variegated usage, fundamentalist distortion and over-simplification so as to be quite meaningless as terms that stand on their own.  We use these terms at our own risk.  Yet the ideas, heartfelt sensations and whispers of knowing that these terms represent to me are utterly enmeshed in the arising of my experience.  What I am cannot be pulled apart from those inner lights.  The words can certainly be taken from me– retired in a bank vault, or appropriated and defiled by harsh doctrines and talking heads– but the realities to which they point are all I have now.

The word miracle for instance often conjures images of the supernatural.  Walking on water.  Feeding multitudes of people from a few baskets of bread and fish.  Raising things from the dead.  (Usually mammals.  Very few fence post resurrections in the literature, for instance.)  And so on and so forth.  I know these examples are culturally myopic and that other cultures have plentiful examples as well.  A book I enjoyed very much when I read it a number of years ago was The Way of the White Clouds.  The author tells a story therein of leaping very long distances from boulder to boulder up in the mountains, as if skipping lightly across the sky.  It conjured a very Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon image in my mind.  (Refer to video below.)  And then there’s always Crazy Horse shaking the soldiers’ bullets from his bone vest periodically in a sacred pre-enactment of Kevlar.  (Makes you wonder if Kevlar is taking the long way ’round.)  The word miracle can loosely be applied to all of these phenomena.

But I don’t think these are the essence of miracles.  I think these images that burn into our minds are the outward representations of what the miracle truly is.  I think miracles are invisible.  I think they are a restructuring of one’s mind and heart.  They are an instantaneous shifting of one’s patterns of thought and knowing that yield an opening, an expansion, an inversion, a piercing of boundaries, an inrush of clarity.  They are miraculous because they provide an avenue of understanding that previously didn’t exist, or seem available.  It couldn’t be chosen because it couldn’t be seen.  It laid outside of history, outside of previous experience, and thus outside of one’s vocabulary of possibility.  Miracles insert letters into the alphabets we use, and words into our languages.  They add colors to our palettes.  They turn us inside out, and render entire epochs of time moot because of what they bring forth within us.

I think the outward, phenomenal representations described above arise because the essence of who we are is coupled to the entire field of form in ways we have yet to fully grasp.  A miracle isn’t the product of one, isolated personal will magically commanding matter to comply with its desires, or even a field of individual wills aligning.   It is a flash bulb pulse in the invisible, a hidden strike of lightning that reveals and mobilizes unity.  In unity there are no play-books or scripts, no schemes or planning, no parts to be played, nothing that could go wrong.  There’s just a line that crackles in a zig-zag pattern through eternity, yielding exactly what’s needed.  A fish.  A restructuring of time and space.  A buoyancy.  The result needn’t be considered supernatural.  It’s just that more of what is natural became available for an instant.  In unity, we couple with the world in ways we cannot predictably understand.

I’ve been thinking of these words more and more lately– the ones I can’t explain– because as I said, they’re all I have now.    I know the difficulties we share in this world cannot be healed by invention and technology, by policy or debate, by legal or military action, or by ethical arguments.  The hidden roots of the world arising around us must be nourished– the roots that extend deeply into our minds, and are caught in the ferment of our pasts, our fears, our guilt, and our judgments.  The miracle is needed because we can’t see beyond our own conclusions.  We can’t see what is possible outside of our own constructions, projections and hand-drawn boundaries.  We can’t figure this out on our own.  We fabricate the boundaries of the possible in ways we can’t understand, and become trapped by our own rules.  The miracle is the gift that pierces the false screen of our minds, and shows what lies beyond.  It is the gift of insight.  It is the surge of recognition and potency that will remake the world.

Miracles are natural, and all around us.  Thank God…

I happened upon Barbara’s site a few weeks ago when she was mulling over the idea of a second round of Awakening Experiences, and told her I would like to participate.  Then I promptly disappeared into the marrow of my life for a few weeks.  She pinged me with a reminder last week sometime and asked if I was still willing, and wondered if I would take February 2^nd.  I chuckled at her unsolicited selection, because it seemed the perfect day for a bit of contemplation—it being the last day of my fortieth year.   And Barbara of course, wouldn’t have had any previous knowledge of this timing.

There’s a quote from A Course of Love that at least partly summarizes my feelings at the present time.  “The challenge now is in creation rather than accomplishment.  With peace, accomplishment is achieved in the only place where it makes any sense to desire it. With your accomplishment comes the freedom and the challenge of creation. Creation becomes the new frontier, the occupation of those too young to rest, too interested in living still to welcome the peace of dying. Those who could not change the world one iota through their constant effort, in peace create the world anew.”  (C:6.17)

The processes at work in my inner life have often been fueled by the question of how best to invest my time in this world.  This question stretches back to my days in elementary school, when teachers singled me out for special studies.  It appeared I had some potential.  I was sent to the library when I finished my coursework to delve into things, but I had no idea what I was to delve into exactly.  I just wanted to read spy novels.  The Cardinal in the Kremlin, to my fourteen year old mind, was astounding.  I had no idea what the potential was that I supposedly possessed, or what I was to do with it, and this unknowing was difficult to bear.

Uncertainty is a strange and tugging satellite in our lives—a little uncomfortable in its waning, quite painful in its waxing, but always a generator of transformative tides.  When I graduated from high school I sat on a stage next to the principal, and the Bishop, and when it was my turn I gave a speech.  I wrote it alone at my bedroom desk the week before, surrounded by posters of triumphant soccer players.  It was all about looking past the pursuits of the world, to the richness of living with meaning and depth, even if it meant looking past the treasures the world wished us to crave.  Our hearts are always rampant when we give them a chance to speak uninhibited, at any age, but I was not entirely prepared for the follow-through.

I changed majors once in college, and nearly dropped out to work on a ranch in Montana.  Instead, I met my future wife, finished school, and moved a few thousand miles across the country.  I took a writing class my senior year in college as an elective—a bit of an odd choice for an engineer—and loved it.  I wrote half a novel that year but my confidence and my enthusiasm fizzled.  I felt inadequate about the whole thing.  I still didn’t know who I was or what I was doing.  I eventually got a job and some days it hurt like a sonuvabitch!  Not the work, but the echoes of my uncertain state.  The way I failed to find it meaningful.  The way so many interactions were permeated with disconnection and dissembling.

Realizing there was really no need for me to feel so uncertain or forlorn, I used the immediate present of my life as the vehicle for learning to be at peace.  These decisions to turn around and face our difficulties are moments of grace.  I could have run for the hills again.  Over the decade that followed I slowly grew into myself, and set my fears down one by one.  Eventually, I looked up and realized I could be at peace with myself, and with the world.  I think that is really what awakening is.  It’s the moment you realize you can be at peace with what is.  Then you find yourself in the position of the quote above.  You don’t need to cultivate anymore modalities, practices or insights to be at peace.  Peace has been established.  Peace is rising to the point of over-flowing.  This is the moment when we activate our true potential I think.  We discover we’re in love with the whole thing.

Sometime—I can’t say exactly when—I began to move with greater certainty.  I began to write again, and I started this blog.  I made wonderful connections here with others who were walking in this direction.  My creative acts began to feel like endeavors of authenticity, and little by little they seemed to find their way closer to the mark.  Meaning began to flow back and forth through more and more channels.  This mark I speak of is the certainty that moments taken to collaborate with the river of meaning present in our own hearts give rise to vehicles of expression that ripple through the world.  Whether small or large in their external recognition, it matters not.  Our authenticity pumps the bellows of the world nonetheless, and fuels its creative fire.  One day we look up from engaging freely in what love, and we discover we are in dialogue with the world itself.

This is the new frontier.  The frontier of creation.

This is the movement that takes place in eternity, but twinkles still in time.  Awakening isn’t a state, but the giving of our answer to the cosmic role call.  Yes, I am here.  Yes, I love.  Yes, I desire to share even more deeply in the discovery of what that means.  Yes…  Yes, I would lose myself over and over into this creative flux, knowing that what we gain is everything, is meaning, is one another.  So this is where I find myself these days– drifting along, one step at a time, slowly expanding the conversation that my life has become.

Kimberly is up tomorrow.

It’s that time again here in the US.

I’m increasingly confronted by discussions of politics.  They’re coming into the home, the office, the car.  Through the heating system, the mail slot, and the grocery bags.  And why not?  We’re saturated by it right now.  The incredible hype of the hero and the villain, the opportunity and the impasse, the failures and the victories.  The righteous, the confused, the willing, and the maligned.  The pasts, the futures, the confessions and the exposures.  It’s a difficult conversation for me because it so often comes with a certain scorn, or contempt perhaps, for the other tribe.  I don’t like watching anyone speak of others in derisive or dismissive tones, even the anonymous, though I am not totally naive to the impact human beings are making on the planet and one another.  Often the most difficult part of my day is dealing with other humans.

What we know is a trifle as compared to what sustains us, and yet we act as though our opinions are perfectly obvious.  It’s a brilliant strategy, because who can argue with the obvious?  We act as though we don’t have fallible perceptions at all, but knowledge, as if the little baskets of magazine clippings we carry around on our shoulders are definitive.  We are opinionated, wounded, vindictive, entitled, outspoken, and profoundly ignorant creatures.  What other type of being would think it obvious that Love was actually ours to give or withhold as we pleased?  This is the bottom line of our madness.  The worst part of it.  We don’t even know we believe this, it’s so deeply engrained.  But we wield this would-be super-power before we even know we took offense.

I have a tendency to view politics as a reflection of our collectively held fears and judgments, and to feel that a great deal of what is happening is a fairly accurate reenactment of our inner perceptions.  We’re swimming in them.  I especially feel this way when I see people snicker in disgust about other people.  We get emotional about it.  We turn colors.  We swear.  How could people ever, ever, ever in a million years think that way?  And our problems are always “out there” somewhere.  I recognize this sensation is almost impossible to avoid or escape, because the mathematics are ineluctable.  Get the other ones out of the way, and perhaps we could get on with living the good life.  It’s insanity of course.  When have they ever gone away, for starters?  Never mind that, the strategy is sheer and intoxicating.

I encountered a line from A Course of Love this morning that I felt mattered to all of this.  It said, “All time is included in the spacious Self.  Acceptance is necessary because escape is not possible.  Everything that is, is with us, which is why we are the accomplished as well as the void, the healed as well as the sick, the chaos and the peace.  Thus we heal now by calling on wholeness, accepting the healed self’s ability to be chosen while not encountering resistance or any attempts at rejection of the sick or wounded self.” (Dialogues, 14.1)

This recognition is a game changer for me.  There is no escape.  There is no ability to set particular persons or ideas aside.  All of this is who we are, and yet even as this is true, it does not mean that suffering is necessary.  Escape is impossible, but transformation is not.  The fact that sickness is within us does not mean that it must be expressed and given form, but the fact that we try to push all that we dislike away from us, and make it “over there” does engender its expression.  It divides us.  It inhibits the flow of what is natural.  It distorts and manipulates.  The fact that we think a distance can be sustained between here and there creates the type of experience we are having– with sides, with winners and losers, with insufficient means.

It is strange to consider that sickness can be “included”, but not expressed.  It doesn’t really make sense that it can be joined with, and Loved, and dissolved.  Isn’t there like a Conservation of Mass or Energy or something???  Doesn’t what seems so real have to go somewhere?  It’s hard to imagine even walking down such a road.  Think what we’ll have to contact.  Think what we’ll have to encounter, and touch, and become.  This is the way we think when we don’t understand wholeness, when we think it’s an either-or game we’re playing.  We think accepting sickness and chaos means eating rotten scraps out of dumpsters for breakfast, going swan diving into toxic waste, or becoming a full-time lobbyist for the rights of inside traders.  We think it means losing, in short, the things we love, to become the things we don’t.

Of course it’s not like that at all.  What we hunger for in our insulated worlds, is the feeling that comes from truly accepting what is.  The majesty of it.  There’s a real depth to forgiveness, a holiness that rushes in when the inside traders are taken in to our hearts, when the greedy are taken into our hearts, when the addicts are taken into our hearts, when the lazy are taken into our hearts, when the fanatics are taken into our hearts.  When we have become a refuge for them all, then we are complete, and invulnerable, and transformed.  We yield to the expression of what is whole and healed.

This is my vote.  This is the policy I would recommend, that I would encourage myself to move more deeply into.  Until I disappear altogether perhaps, and rediscover myself sitting next to you, playing Go Fish in the Void.

Do you have any lepers?

What about kings, spice merchants, gurus or lawyers?

(…)

What turns?  There’s no turns here…!

The dream is unobtrusive, glowing where no one can see it, following beside me but deep in the ground, visible only by looking straight down through the center of myself, from the inside of my senses.  It’s a thought immune to the semi-annual dental check-ups, the unsolicited catalogs that arrive in the mail, the bouts of automotive repair and immune system reconfiguration, and the dangerous lines of cars queueing behind plow trucks that plod along flashing orange in the night.

It’s a feeling about the way one post transforms into the next.  Words are enfolded into vision, and encounters into awareness.  Moments steep within moments, fractals of hope, and we spill open again and again into an uncut silence.  We pick up the words we find, clean them off, and try to put them in order.  These gifts.  We gather speed, and momentum.  We wonder.  We shake and we threaten to come apart.  One thought transforms into the next– spinning, whirling.  Trees watch us whip past, until the wheels leave the ground.  Until the last rope is cut free and thrown back to shore.  Until forever is the whistle in our ears.

As kids we ran in the park, with our arms out beside us, thinking of this flight.  We ran and ran, stumbling over uncut grass and sunken pockets in the soil, until we came to the railing.  The sky didn’t stop at the railing, but we did.  We did and something else didn’t.  It kept going.  Going and going and going, until we looked away.  And then we ran again, down the path this time, with our arms out beside us, filled by our memories of everything else.

I read a book once from the library.  A history book.  It had a story about a small group of people, a small village’s worth maybe, that went down to a lake and remembered how much they loved one another.  I don’t know what they did, if they were silent or if they spoke.  The book called it a ceremony.  But that just means an opening.  A time for powers to intersect and draw near.  I don’t know if they sat by the lake and remembered specific things together, or if they took turns talking about things inside of them they couldn’t understand.  Or if they even talked at all.  One of them had a name with the word Kettle in it, I think.  I could be wrong.  It was a translation.  A historian’s name.  There’s an assumption that one word can equal another, and bring everything about the first word along with it.  I don’t know if you can do that or not.  And the story went that for a window of time, none of the soldiers’ bullets could touch them.  They stood together by the lake and couldn’t be harmed.  That’s what the history book said, from the academic library.

You don’t hear about power like that so much these days.  It’s a little taboo.  To think we’re so close to the unexpected.  To think it could interrupt our regularly scheduled programming at any moment.  It’s frightening.  Do we really live our lives in such proximity to a power of particularity and need?  A non-conforming power.  A hidden power.  Power that strikes swift and total in a single fragment of space and time, and then is gone forever.  Power that invents the rules as it goes.

All our power now comes from systems and structures and codification.  It has to be beta tested.  It has be considered– its up sides and its down’s.  It has to comply with the rules that have been accepted before.  All our power now is powerlessness that’s gotten organized.

But if you think about it, life is the story of pan flashes.  A gene or two went AWOL, and now we can see.  Sight wasn’t there in the beginning.  Boundaries had to be broken for that to happen.  The past has to be transcended.  Life never really pays all that much attention to what has been, does it?  It just folds it into itself, and responds to it the way movement responds to movement.  But what is Life responding to?  This is the kicker– the thought in the ground following me around.  Our modern talent is knowing what we’re responding to.  We are reasoned.  We must be.  It’s the promise we made to one another.

When we decided to make this world in our image, and then made up the image too, we lost our way a bit.  Now we do things the hard way.  With reasons and precedents.  With indictments and proceedings.  With influence and sway.  It takes four miles of walking to equal one mile.

Then you think how much beauty Nature offers, on such a limited budget.  It’s nothing really but starlight and gravity.  Gravity is a millionth as strong per unit of mass as a baby’s joyful touch– her grasping of your finger, her slap of your face and arms.  But it’s everywhere.  From that alone– starlight and gravity– holiness echoes in all directions.  The thing I find in Nature’s beauty that is so startling is the utter absence of motive.  The absence of reasons.  It’s what makes it real I think.  All of it is just because.  Because.  All of it is like a power by a lake.  It is immediate and unprecedented.  It is a story about Love.

We have to throw our reasons back into the water, I think.  Nevermind what we’ll eat for supper, or what bait worked before.  Maybe those are not the fish we’re trying to catch.  Maybe we need to stop seeking explanations of one another, and just let one thing tumble into the next for a few nights.  Maybe we need to become free of all motive whatsoever, so that Love, weaker even than gravity and starlight, can defy the rules and gather Herself once in a while.  To claim a flash of space and time as Her Own, when we least expect it.  When we’re silent, and forgetful of who we used to be, and once wanted to become.

Our pain is bound up in our memories.  We don’t see what’s in front of us, we just see strange reenactments of our past.  It’s not really our past even, just the things we concluded from our past.  Our conclusions travel with us wherever we go.  This is what Jesus calls learning.  It’s our loyalty to all the stuff we made up.  We keep these little statues woven to the inside of our coats to remind us.  We place them under the bed and deep in the closet corners.  Up on the shelf, behind the pots and pans, there’s a memory we put there.  They’re everywhere.

We think we hid them away, not realizing they’re all in plain sight for those who can see.  Plain sight is all there truly is.

Partly we don’t understand the power that we are.  We don’t understand the implications of locking something away inside.  We think it’s a dark and silent space in which we chose to hide things away, an empty place no one could find.  But we only have one type of room in us, and it’s a projector room.  Everything we’ve ever learned—everything we’ve ever hidden away—swims past in the world around us, in symbol form, over and over and over again.

The remedy of course is brightly colored dreams of the future.  We write them constantly and throw them down the well.  Up ahead somewhere, the brilliance that awaits us will neutralize the misunderstandings that haunt us.  Then we’ll be free.  We have projector rooms beside and inside of projector rooms, and so we play our future over our past.  We neutralize one with the other.  We’re experts at noise cancellation.  It’s a shouting match to produce silence, a game of tuning the colors just right, but still…  The picture is all mixed up.  Our smiles are sometimes strained.  Our trust is something we give or withhold depending on what we see.

Or perhaps we’re tired of authoring pretty pictures, of painting things over with the ideas we like, and tuning lamps and sampling colors.  It’s a lot of work, and we’ve grown tired.  Perhaps our conclusions are all that remain, all that we see.  We sink into them, and everything becomes a vote of confidence for what we have learned.  The evidence is conclusive.  It’s everywhere.  It’s obvious.

But it’s a dream…  If only we could trust that for the merest instant…

We forget everything we know or carry is connected directly to the stars, to the sea, to the warp of space.  The projection room is unbelievable.  The depth and subtlety arising from the seeds we carry inside is astonishing.  It’s so beguiling we can hardly trace the thread of cause and effect.  Most of us conclude it’s not even there…  What I see has nothing to do with me.  It is objective, independent, and hardly so sentimental in its workings.  It’s vast and elusive.

Then the moon rises, the light shifts, and the future we were writing on top of our past fades a little.  A tear forms in the corner of the eye.  The past shines through the future, in the present.  Everything is tarnished.  Rosy cheeks are replaced with skeletons.  We buckle.  Because the light shifted.  Because a cloud drifted across the sun, or we passed into the sodium glow of a street lamp.  The construct we fabricated to give us hope has disappeared.

We’re all quite convinced of ourselves, of our learning, of the symbols that dash across our lives.  Who would we be without them?  That’s the scariest question of all, the one we all must ask.

My favorite de-constructionist spiritual texts suggest that with healing comes the end of time.  Some have interpreted this to mean the end of stars and seas, the end of tree and stone, the end of winged-flight and furry hibernation.  A return to nothing but unified light.  So people dream of a time of uninterrupted bliss, and no light bulbs to change, or groceries to grow or buy.  I think such a return is certainly possible in an ultimate cosmic sense, but I also think maybe the end of time just means the end of our efforts to cancel the past with our future.  Maybe it just means we call our own bluff.  We see the pain is our own idea come back to haunt us.  We collect our statues and hidden memories and place them into the fire.

We make our way bit by bit.  If I hadn’t felt some pain of late, for reasons neither here nor there, I wouldn’t have written this.  I wouldn’t have walked on the beach with Jesus for a little while, outside of time, in this gentle light, and let a few memories dissolve completely.  There is a quote from A Course in Miracles that I found recently that speaks to this I think…  I will rest there for now…

“And when the memory of God has come to you in the holy place of forgiveness you will remember nothing else, and memory will be as useless as learning, for your only purpose will be creating.” (T-18.IX.14)

I take the pack of index cards out of my shirt pocket, slide the rubber band off, and lay them on the table.  Hafiz has prepared a few placards and set them up at credible intervals.  They read, “No Way, José,” “I Sure Hope Not,” “Why, Of Course!” “Prepare Yourself For Tears,” and “Jesus Christ!”

I take a breath and shuffle the cards.  Place them in a neat pile on the table.

The first card I flip says, You are a thinking being.  I hum appreciatively– a safe and wholesome opening– and show my card to Hafiz, who nods.  It’s a nod like I just told him the out of doors is often filled with weather, or horses have teeth also.  I slide the card over to “Why, Of Course!”

I draw again.

Everything you desire, as well as what you need, must be earned.

I hum again, this time in acknowledgment of our little game’s escalation.  Bit of tricky business, this…  I hesitate.  “I Sure Hope Not” is looking like the one, but there’s more to it.  It’s definitely not all that I really feel about this card.  There’s something else and I’m trying not to look it in the eye.  I’m about to get tired.  I’m about to suggest we watch a Seinfeld episode.  “Prepare Yourself For Tears” is looking like a dark horse candidate.

How could I not know how I really feel?

“How ’bout a two-fer?” I ask.

Hafiz nods.  Yes, a two-fer.  Yes, the sky is often populated by clouds.  Yes, the table before us is made from the flesh of trees.  Yes, a thinking being can be confused, but it doesn’t change the fact that the spring follows the winter.

I turn over the next one.

Creation is joy extending forever, without limit or interruption or discontinuity.  There is nothing outside of it, and nowhere it is not.

I’m starting to sweat.  I may as well be reading machine language.  The words are standing politely on the other side of a cosmic pane of glass.  Over there.  Not here.  They’re there, and I’m here.  I can hardly read my own writing.  Joy?  I must have written this one down during the ecstatic consummation of a rocket launch, or while I was hanging off the back of a jet ski outrunning a wave as high as a small city.  The letters look like a seismograph recording of the day that asteroid hit the earth– yes, that one, when the dinosaurs succumbed to a wave of very bad feelings.  What if this card had been pulled on that day?

I start to hurt.  They’re there, and I’m here.  I wrote this down once so I’d remember, and now it is waving at me and I don’t feel a thing.  My faculties are on pause.  I don’t know a single thing.  This table is made of wood but what the hell is wood.  I feel trapped.  Just three cards in and I’m done.  Weren’t pterodactyls Creation, too?

I smile to Hafiz wanly and lift my hands from the table, palms facing the cards.  I slide back my chair.  I surrender.

“Write that down,” Hafiz says.  He slides me a blank index card and a pen.

I take the pen.  It is hard to use because it has a bouquet of mismatched feathers sticking out of it– turkey, toucan, chickadee, heron, eagle, chicken, probably a raven– and it seems prepared to dust off the whole world.  They’re tickling my nose while I write.  Why would you mix an eagle feather and a chicken feather?

I don’t know how I truly feel. I surrender.

My uncertainty dissolves in the presence of such honesty.  The room of my heart expands.

“Want to give me one of those other ones?” he asks.

I flip through the deck.

I find the one I’m looking for.  I can figure this out myself.  I pass it over.  Hafiz folds it into the shape of a paper airplane, pours lighter fluid down the center crease, lights the nose, and lofts it gently through the open window.  We watch together as the flames slide sideways through the night.

I’m thinking about ordering take-out.  Thinking about that Thai place we went to once.  I’m so relieved about my new card I’m breathing like a morning mist and tasting coconut soup and my eyes are clouding with tears.

And Hafiz is chuckling.

Yes.  Yes the sky will sometimes fill with flames.

It is hard to grasp the mind’s power.

In this regard I would say I have largely attempted to judge the mountain based on how fast it can run.  It rather misses the point.  But lately it feels like there is power in the quiet.  The patterns of fence mending and worthy-making want back in from time to time, but somehow I’ve unsheathed the knife that cuts through the web.  It’s kind of fun.

I should really blankety-blank blank.  Hiiiiiiii-ya!

If I was a better such or such, my life would be more like that one.  BANG!

(Blows the smoke off the barrel, twirls the piece on the end of a finger and slides it into the holster in one fluid movement.)

The things that provide for me now are eroding and one day will be gone.  It’s never too early to prepare for a potential disaster.  Ooaooww-fuh-fuh-HA!

Eventually we all find the way to breath into something deeper.  It’s kind of like breaking a habit.

My assessment is that in order to know life without fear, we must be willing to be ambushed by glory.  It’s weird to be crossing the desert and allow oneself to be offered a recliner, a foot stool, a potted shade tree and a glass bottle of sparkling water.  It doesn’t compute.  By rights, we should be high-tailing it.  Peace doesn’t feel right when the smoke of the battlefield is still massing in the sky.  But I think that’s precisely when we should settle into that quiet.

We don’t really grasp the mind’s power, and we have no clue how deeply we are loved.  These are intensely related phenomena I think.  It’s one thing to accept we are loved by God, or Jesus, or Hafiz, or our partner, or our best friend, or Love itself.  It’s quite another to discover we are loved by every single person we encounter.  It would take a certain madness to go there.  Oh.  Shit.  We’re not prepared for it.  Say what!?  It’s easier to let the past prove otherwise.  Then we can go back to taking pot shots at reality.

But there’s a physics to Love that insists upon the fact that we are loved by every being.  Otherwise Love would be a conjecture subject to proof, a contingent reality, and I’m convinced that cannot be.  If you’ve felt Love even once, you may agree the notion that it is a contingent reality does not seem at all rational.  Love is not built up out of particles; nor is Love the integral of particular thoughts over time.  Love is not a commodity.  The heart of the world’s problem is the insistence that Love is complicated somehow, that it has properties, that it’s not quite here yet, or there’s more of it over there.  That there’s something between us and it.  A better time.  A holier place.  And it really feels that way nearly all the time when we have our stopwatches out and we’re keeping an eye on that mountain.  When we’re gasping for air.

Sitting-still often helps.  Or something like it.  I don’t think the benefit of sitting-still is that we stop thinking, because thought itself is beautiful.  But an instant without thinking will do us a world of good– as a means and an end perhaps.  It’s like the point at the end of the pendulum swing.  Sitting as quiet as possible reveals the nature of our relationship to thought.

It’s a lovely insight that we have a relationship to thought.  That relationship is Love, and thought itself is never-ending.  When we sit quietly we can encounter our relationship to thought, and open up an honest conversation.  Of course it’s awkward being in conversation without the use of words, but if we don’t try we’ll never understand how everything has a relationship to thought.  And I think once we discover we have a wordless relationship to thought, grains of sand and entire mountains begin to make sense.  We start to grasp the power of the mind.  We start to see how like to everything we are.

That we think and we have a relationship to thought makes our situation unique in some respects, but not fundamentally so.  It is our relationship to thought that is fundamental.  Love is fundamental.  How strange, how compelling, how beautiful to watch the full moon rise and realize we have a relationship to that which has a relationship with all that is.

To realize we are in Love.

My friends–!

May the awareness of Love
settle upon you
as if the discarded cape
of the Archangel Zorro
has curled down through the great skies above
in curling volutes of black velvet wonder
like the skyfall shuffle
of an impassioned chorus of sting rays–
enfolding and squishing and fluttering around,
riding currents of wind and smoky light,
hugging thermals and insights and
suddenly scooting sideways
with gusts of certainty shot through its belly–
to settle gently upon the bench beside you,
undiscovered as yet–!
perhaps taking the form
of the Archangel Zorro himself–!
so that when you look up
from the weight of the last few decades
to see if the bus is on time
or if you’re being forced to suffer
yet another faceless injustice
when you’ve already endured
about all you can stand,
you find yourself looking
into the crystalline eyes of a holy friend
you haven’t seen
in many dogged years
who now has snuck up on you–
a specter of joy arising before you
to rescue you from all those
leagues of insult and public transportation
with an unexpected smile,
a loaded heart ready to fire,
and a black velveteen swoosh of wonder.

May the awareness of Love so described
settle upon your shoulders
and accompany you
wherever it is you go.
May you dash and whirl as you travel,
or at least appear to do so
because of that school of holy sting rays
circling and brandishing and gleaming
in your rippled wake
that will never leave your side.

May it be so,
for even now the Archangel Zorro
is riding across the sky
on his holy steed,
flinging capes of rescue into the breeze.

After all, that is what
the Archangel Zorro does.

It is in my response to the world that I discover the thoughts most active within me, and it is quite often a humbling experience.  The movement stretches and pulls and teases to the surface residual uncertainties and doubt.  I have taken in reams and reams of information over the years intended to set me (and all of us) free, which my Undersecretary of Actual Motivations has taken under advisement, and accepted with a begrudging nod.

Did I misinterpret it as encouraging?  Very sly, that whole department.

The Spokesperson out front is under the illusion that taking something under advisement is code-speak for a done deal.  It’s only later, when I am doing something– doing something new— that I realize I’ve got vectors of intention dashing in every direction.  I’m a bureaucracy that’s closing ranks, hanging posters of gleaming enthusiasts in the cafeteria, holding after-hours meetings and coming up with a plan to return to safe territory.  I’m the point of origin of an air raid drill.  Everyone just doing their jobs.  Running across the yard, holding their helmets in place, looking frantically to the sky.

Yes, I took those ideas under advisement.  (We’re leaping over puddles and flinging ourselves down the stairs.)  They were very nice, but it’s not exactly the time or the place, now, is it!?

All this because responding to a calling pulls us into the open, forcing us to leave the (relatively) safe environs of our past.  It stirs the pot.  I think this is why our movement in the world is so important.  We can see and experience directly the way our patterns of thought play out.

* * * * *

Hafiz is seated with me at the center of the collapse.  He has brought his binoculars, as if we were going birding, and he is pointing out with great care the architecture of insanity.  Do I see that column over there?  It is on the verge of buckling.  He smiles.  There is no one to blame.  He has seen it a thousand times before, the ebb and flow of human suffering.  The way we construct it, the way we tear it down.  To him it is simply a movement, with laws no one can change, like the sea, but when conditions change the sea will change with it.

* * * * *

The thing I find is that the line between free and clear expression that brings to light the holiness within us and a demolition derby of dispossessed emotional tenants is razor thin.  The line is razor thin but the territories on either side are starkly different.  There’s just one thing different– the deepest sensation of identity– and it means everything.

The beauty of being in the world is that if we’re attentive this becomes quite clear.  We start to see what we’re doing.  We cannot hide from ourselves or the plans we’ve kludged together to navigate the crossing of the line, because as we march for the line a strange thing happens: we find ourselves more and more alone.  More and more transparent.  Right up at the line there’s nothing left but that gasping for air.  Like we’re trying to break the speed of light or something.  It’s all that primal discomfort that set this in motion.  I’m being driven forward by a strange whip that I once invented.

Jesus puts an arm over my shoulder, holds up his cell phone, shows our location on the map.  I can see the line.  I can see a cafe, a nursery school, the traffic conditions, an advertisement for a Buick, the weather… and the line.  Then he swipes for a while to a point several blocks over, and I can see the line doesn’t exist there.

So I run like hell over there.

By the time I arrive, there it is.  I’m crawling and wheezing again.  Like I’m climbing to the top of the Sears Tower wearing a bag full of books I’ve read.

Jesus holds up his cell phone.  Yup.  An advertisement for outdoor patio furniture, two more cafes, an update on the traffic conditions… and the line.  Swipes a few times and I can see the line doesn’t exist back where I was.

This universe is rigged, I suggest.  My eyebrow is twitching.

Jesus says to close my eyes and consider the street we’re on and imagine the most beautiful flowering of its potential I possibly can.

It comes with surprising clarity when it’s all that you’re after– the stunning goodness in things.  Okay.

Good.  Now can you see that living inside of the street your eyes show to you?

I look at the cheap construction, the scooped-out roads, the dented fenders and the squabbling birds.  I’m squinting pretty hard here.  That man on the corner is a beggar with violent eyes.  The vision is getting pretty wobbly.

The man on the corner is you, Jesus says.  He’s us.

I look a little closer.  The man is talking to no one and shaking his head to the sky, then he throws a seed to the pigeons.  I see it!

Jesus nods.  So live in response to what you see.  That is all.

* * * * *

Hafiz has never moved.  He is watching the waves come in, the buildings topple over, the streets crack apart.  The structures give way to a beautiful city just beyond, and all around.  The line is nowhere to be found.  He hands me the binoculars.

Thanks, I say.  Did you happen to bring any snacks?

Authenticity is not unveiled in a swoop of the cape.  That only goes to show the last few days or hours or minutes– whatever the length of time has been since the previous flourish of unveiling– have been inauthentic.  What the flourish reveals is the port of entry to our truth’s harbor.  You enter by submarine.  Your instruments have failed.  The ballast is leaking and the batteries are dead.  The hull is creaking and popping in a very unsettling way, and you settle on the bottom of the harbor on a barge of sand.

(You wait for Hafiz to knock on the air lock!)

Authenticity is what we emerge with.  We need a lifetime to get down to it, and often even the moments of our most uncomfortable vulnerability and of our most passionate honesty are but preludes.  But we can’t know that until we have them.  Without them we would be stuck.  They open the door.

I’m not sure that honesty and authenticity are quite the same, but I think we need a great deal of the former to reveal the latter.  We are not our most authentic when we are chronically lonely, when we are painfully uncertain, when we are angry about a failed relationship or bitter about a recent diagnosis.  We can’t know this until later, though.  I am not saying authenticity cannot peek through at any moment, or even be spurred into revelation by these conditions, but I am saying they are not our most authentic patterns of being.  We have to be honest about this, without shame or blame or denial, in order to make contact with what is authentic within us.  If we want to give it room to grow, we have to give it room to grow.

A day of suspended judgment is a good start.  Then we can be ill and broke and alone and authentic simultaneously.

If what is authentic about us is that we are tarnished, defiled and helpless, then Jesus and the Buddha and many other wise and loving beings have wasted their time.  And I don’t believe that is so.  There may be honesty in admitting we find ourselves in these patterns.  Again.  And again.  But our addictions are not authentic expressions of our given nature.

We can have needs without being perpetually needy.  Our authenticity is a bridge between resource and need.  When we don’t know this we wander impoverished, or we stockpile.

We can fail without being a failure.  Our authenticity is equally revealed in its response to both success and failure, and by that measure cannot differentiate between them.  When we don’t know this we play it safe, hedge our bets, position ourselves strategically, or we fall into the pitfall of taking more credit than is due for the events and conditions of our lives.  By the same means we can succeed without being a success.

We can be honest about our brokenness, and very often this is helpful, but we are not broken so it is important to recognize the gift of the temporary experience of it.  There is some skin to be shed.  Some mask or costume we’re wearing.  Some ideal to which we yet cling.  Something that is not helping.  Authenticity knows how to remove these cloaks, and wash the old wounds gently.

Authenticity knows how to regrow a split tree, to unwind a knot, to mend a heart, to discover a path.  Authenticity knows how to dead-reckon across fields and fields and fields of endless futility, to find the lit house just up ahead.

We can be authentic in our brokenness, and that is in the instant when discover that it need not be.  In discovering this we find we are able to carry the weight of our present.  This is not a show of strength or heroism, but a display of what is true.  Inside of us, in our authenticity, there are legions of possibility and succor.  There are medics, chieftains, informants and counsellors.  There is peace.

Sometimes we use our brokenness as evidence of our failure and compound our difficulty.  But authenticity doesn’t judge.  Authenticity extends a hand.  Authenticity says follow me.  Trust me.  I have done this many times.  Your case is not as special as you think.

When we are authentic we can receive help when it is first needed, rather than when we are forced to submit to a crisis.

When we are authentic we are not telling ourselves how it would be if we were being authentic.  We don’t try to calm seas to prove we have the truth inside us.  We don’t seek for powers or gifts that have not been given.  Nor do we run from the ones that we have.

And when we are inauthentic, it is our honesty that will bring us back.  But it is a special kind of honesty.  It is the kind of honesty that says even though we don’t know how to be authentic, that is okay because we don’t have to know how to be what we already are.  There isn’t really a knowing involved.  We just need to be honest we’ve been living in the dark.  It is the kind of honesty that looks beyond difficulty, keeping the truth in sight.

It is the kind of honesty that refuses to weigh the evidence our pasts have produced against the inevitability of our given nature, but says instead, Yes, these things have been so.  So what.

The description I love best is that each of us is an intersection of matter and spirit, the above and below, the eternal and the present, of knowledge and mystery.  I am tired of materialism—so very tired of its laborious absurdities, the dead ends it tries to pretty-over, the delicate faculties of the human being it would all but silence.  Even so, I would not discard logic or rational thought.  I would simply hold them in their proper place.  I would offer them a new beginning, a more expansive starting point on which to build, and partner with whom to play.  I would add unto them the faculties of inner knowing, the resonance of the heart that awakens us, the trust in the unknown that reveals us.

There is something wrong with the notion of self that we have had, but nothing wrong with the notion that we can know who we are.  There is only one Self and we are it, even as we extend from it to embody particular movements of differentiation and expression.  To disavow the power of identity so completely that we become trapped in an ineffectual lingering is merely to keep a circuit closed.  It is a way of hiding.  But to let the self of form and its myopic viewpoint drive us willy-nilly over the landscape, discontented with all it sees, arguing and pushing and nullifying, is to not exist at all.  It is to be a ghost.

Identity is as fluid as beauty is.  Identity has no bounds.  Identity gathers itself for an instant into a loving smile, the reflections of a mountain lake, the plunging of a falcon, the fruiting of a tree.  Identity is forever, and forever just beginning.  We are it.  Over and over.  We are.

The description I love best regarding the current age is that spirit and matter have yet to fully join.  The marriage is incomplete.  We know a little but not a lot.  The marriage must be consummated within our own hearts and minds, and then something new will emerge.  We don’t know what it is.  I can get carried away with ideas, with hints of what could be that I have seen even in this life, but there are those who would scoff and write me off as one of those.  It is better today to rest on the abstract—the feeling of the sun, the softness of rain, the whirl of emotion, the heaviness of despair and the moment it resolves into something you can hold in your hand.  Something with wings and a pulse.  Something that takes flight.  There is no need to say what will be when it is already being.

It’s okay to know things you cannot prove.  Let us not rob each other of this sublime right, this creative necessity.  When two people know something they cannot prove, and they each set it into words that cannot be reconciled, they merely haven’t dug deeply enough into what they know.  They have dug into the soil and hit something hard.  To one it is a field stone.  Look at the wall our ancestors built that borders the property.  To another its a buried trunk.  Debate is no good without digging deeper.

It is just no good discounting what others know.  It is arrogance, which leads to war and poverty.  We are as much invisible as we are visible, as much holy as profane, as much animal as divine.  We can see across time, and bring to bear a great Love upon the moment if we so choose.  If we let the mystery balance the known.  Or we can insist there are limits on what is knowable– on what may be known and who can know it and how.  This is the cause of every poverty.  This insistence.

Things that appear to be so under one set of conditions, are often found to be quite different under another.  It is for this reason that most of our conclusions formed historically, in the context of separation consciousness, are erroneous.  What’s remarkable about the experience of life is that we can be completely incorrect about ultimate reality, and have a very real and vivid experience of our own false conclusions up to and even through the experience of dying, without ever being more than the width of a thought from a completely different experience.

For some, the first question that arises is how exactly we are to determine whose experience or picture of reality is “false” and whose is “true”.  This sounds like a question we ought to be able to answer, but unfortunately it is not easily done.  If experience did not differ based upon what I’ll call the “basic interpretive settings” of what are largely unconscious logical faculties—e.g. the underlying choice of separation vs unity consciousness— and, if the experiences to which we are drawn, and which are drawn to us, were not the result of a deep relatedness between each one of us and the world we experience, then by rights this question would be easily answered.  But it is not easily answered, (at least by the thinking mind alone), because we are fundamentally and primordially related to all that exists, and because the deep-lying cognitive filters we apply to experience do as they’re told.

In other words, we live in a logical rat hole.  Our experiences are assigned meaning by cognitive processes that reinforce the standing interpretations, and neither we ourselves, nor the world out there we would study, are fixed constellations of meaning.  All that exists in third-party, observable form, is meaning-less.  A blank canvas.  We are the painters, not the guests at the museum centuries later.  When we put a daub of black paint on the canvas, then step back and say, “Look!  It is black!  See!” we are not being particularly clever.  We don’t experience it this way of course, because the complexity of human experience is astounding.

One problem is that there isn’t even an obvious way to determine if what I’m saying is correct: that we are fundamentally related in some manner to the movement of creation, or that the meanings we assign to experience are in fact self-referential and circular logics.  I suggest that this problem does have a solution, however, and that solution is the reality of suffering.  We need only hypothesize that suffering results from adopting stances incongruent with the nature of ultimate reality—the ultimate nature of ourselves and all that collectively exists—and that correcting those stances will end the experience of suffering.  This then, provides a compass—a tool for discernment.

Suffering of course is a challenge to define at any one instance of time, as the effects of our conceptual stances often take many years to unfold in our lives.  Sometimes we suffer immediately, and other times it takes decades for the nature of our choices to be revealed to us.  We can keep anxiety and difficulty tucked behind a facade of well-being for many years if we so desire.  And of course, none of us are all that excited about admitting the stances we have chosen are not resulting in happiness—none of us enjoy being proven incorrect about ourselves—and so it is human nature to act as though we are who we think we should be.  The only people we’re fooling of course, are ourselves.

So this is an inside job.  This is a job best undertaken in the quiet of one’s own heart, and there is in fact nothing whatsoever that needs to be said to others about what they can or should be doing, too.  Nothing good can really come of instructing another on how to accomplish the task we ourselves have yet to accomplish.  What is useful, is true companionship along the way.  These are the people who share in the readiness to question their basic propositions, and to report honestly on the experiences that derive from that, but more importantly, these are people who see you in ways you yet cannot.  These are people we can drop the guard around, neither to wallow in our difficulties nor to proclaim a false triumph, but to truly join with, because in joining our own private Idaho’s dissolve.  When we join together, we triangulate the location of our false perceptions, and then the choice is brought clearly to light: either we choose to continue with it, or to let it go.

We live in a world that demands a great burden of proof from us.  If any of us wish to assert an idea that is not in accord with the received thinking, then we are put to the task of proving it.  Ideas that cannot withstand external scrutiny are rejected.  But if it is indeed the case that our minds process information in ways that reinforce standing perceptual modes, and that even the circumstances in which we find ourselves derive from a deep relatedness—e.g. particular conditions of belief and learning that are unique to each of us interact with the world in a meaningful way—then by and large no externalized proof is possible.  We will never convince another that there is a more fulfilling way of experiencing ourselves and the world, and why should we?  Our need to do so is largely derived from the false hope that enlisting another in our viewpoint will validate it.  Perhaps the most powerful choice we can make is to simply live, and be the unique examples of life that we are.

Joy is its own litmus test, and anyone that is truly joyous over the long haul has probably got it right, regardless of the words and symbols they choose to use.  This is the flip side of the reality that suffering tells us when we have clung to a position that is ultimately incorrect.  Joy confirms we have aligned ourselves—our thinking, our feeling and our knowing—with the ultimate nature of things, while suffering confirms that we have not.

All of which is to say quite simply: we each have within us all that is required to experience lives of abiding joy.  And though it may at times seem a lengthy process of shifting our beliefs and learned perceptions, our lives guide us unerringly to this long sought reality, if we are but willing to listen to them.