angelbirdflies

We are all God seeds.  Cells in the infinite body of consciousness.  Not separate and apart from that which we are but intimately one with all life everywhere.  In the dream of separation we float in the great waters of truth but imagine a ME separate and apart, longing for more, longing for other, longing to wake up, longing for home.  Not knowing, in all our reaching and contriving, controling and predicting, that the me so intent on waking, never wakes up.  It is awakened from.  Not in some violent transcendence of self, but in the same innocent, eye (I) open, waking from sleep.

Seeking. At some point, along every great journey, we come to see that it is not the destination that matters but every step along the way.  We remember that there is no "path", no grand design sprinkled with glitter  and marked by a giant neon sign announcing "my purpose this way". We lay down our path by walking. Seeking, with all its incumbent strategies of fortune and fame, youth and vigor, me and mine, meditation and austerity, enlightenment and greatness, is simply a distraction from this one and only Now.  It's a subtle aggression against our life, as it is, in this moment.  It isn't another something to be overcome.  That would require a great deal of tilting at windmills with Quixote inspired absurdity. No. When we see this moment as it is, complete with it's vulnerability, uncertainties, unknown variables and obtuse horizons, we arrive in the only place we can ever truly call home. Now.

When my mind begins it's whirl of thought and constricts my heart, I take to the woods.  The moment my feet hit the trail, I experience a softening.  I don't mean to suggest that I leave my chatty companion back at the jeep.  No, she comes along, but conditioned thought is no longer the object of my attention; my eyes are too busy beholding beauty, my ears too rapt with the song of bird and the rustle of wind across the horizon, my nose is held captive by the smell of sunshine and earth, pine tree and sweat and my hands are too busy caressing the tall fronds of grass and rolling sage.  With so much beauty and grandeur, the little rumblings of a busy mind just don't garner a lot of hype. And as I walk, my breath slows, my mind clears, my heart opens and I surrender, again and again, to this moment, as it is, right now.

  For those of you who know and love me, it will be sufficient to say that I am happy.  Not superficial, moon-eyed happy, but a deep resevoir of happy that overflows with contentment.  It tastes like gratitude. “The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.” -Rumi

Be Present? In enlightenment teachings, you may hear the phrase, “be present.” But if you look around, ‘you’ are the present moment. ‘You’ are not separate from it. ‘You’ are life itself. The only thing obscuring this realization is mental and emotional activity that continuously tries to move away from this moment into a dream of past, future, and resistance to now. The notion that you are separate from life is a creation of thought. The personal will who tries to ‘be present’ and bring about a personal awakening is the dream. Instead of doing anything, including trying to be present, gently notice what is already being done. A dream of self is already being told. Thought is replaying the past, searching into future, and resisting what is in this moment, all for the benefit of a “me.” That mind movement is a dream of control. It is a dream of personal will. Suffering and searching arise when you buy into the illusion of control and personal will. When the personal will is

In nature, I find myself standing in awestruck amazement before the craggly, twisted, worn and weathered aspects of life.  Their seasoned journey through time tends to bring me to my proverbial knees. As I pass through check-out lines, I see evidence of our cultures limited notion of beauty, with it's deification of the unmarred, slender, frizzless, lineless ease of youth.  We internalize these messages but seldom seem to ask ourselves on a foundational level if that has been our experience. I see beauty in the bud, fresh with promise.  It's easily discerned in that springtime rush. But it is no less apparent in life's fading from fullness, when the passage of time is discernible in the history on the surface of a tree, a face, a stone, a faded bloom. In that wide embrace, nothing is outside beauties door and my heart breaks open, time and again, falling in love with life itself.

 Gratitude.