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.
