angelbirdflies

This dance of life has long been a conundrum to me, the ultimate zen koan. I tried hard to make sense of it all...to understand...to comprehend...to manage...ah yes... and to control... until something quite wonderful happened.  I came to the undeniable truth that I can't.  Whew!  In fact, that's the great comedic relief to the whole dog and pony show.  It's beyond our thinking.  We can lean into life, trust it and surrender. Not in some great sweeping, once-and-for-all enlightened " Aha!   I got this"  but in the ordinary moment-to-moment, leaning back into life. We can drop the opacity of self and embrace the unknown with all the hot messiness of our own misplaced longing. After all this time, all these books, all these workshops, all this practice and all this seeking it's humbling to admit that it's just not that complicated.  It doesn't require years of ascetic devotion or my poetically, pious pretense masquerading as " I'm gonna get...

True love is like the love of a parent for a child: even though you feel frustrated at times, this love is constant. It is similar to life, which might drive you bananas at times or be really nice.  This love is beyond the good moments and the difficult moments, which continue to happen. When you have awakened to this love that transcends every good and bad moment, a radical revolution occurs in your relationship with life itself.  This is a love that has no opposite, such as hate, but is present through everything, in all moments.  When you realize this, it is a revolution because, when you see that this love that you are loves the unlovable, loves what you're not supposed to love or what you were not allowed to love culturally, and is not paying attention to the separating rules of ego, you realize this is a different kind of love.  ~ From:  Emptiness Dancing , by Adyashanti. 

“Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.”     - Eckhart Tolle

We can experience countless sunrises and still fear the unknown darkness, lurking in the hidden recesses beyond our visible encounters.  Every day we experience the sun's birth afresh and fears are relegated once more to the periphery.  Yet in the dark of night, when our senses are blinded by the limitations of our perception, is it possible to lean back into the unseen, unknown and trust that all is well.  All is well. Gautama Buddha is credited with saying, "Be a light unto yourself".  Perhaps if we linger in that uncertainty, when all our senses are screaming for proof, and rest, even in the midst of our fearful imaginings, we will find ourselves self-luminous.  Lighting our own way in the dark. Perhaps.

I used to live in  A cramped house with confusion  And pain. But then I met the Friend And I started getting drunk  And singing all Night. Confusion and pain Started acting nasty, Making threats, With talk like this, "If you don't stop 'that'--- All that fun--- We're   Leaving." - Hafiz

Now That All your Worry Has proved such an Unlucrative Business, Why Not Find a better Job. - Hafiz

When I was very young, I heard a story and it goes something like this: There are two birds that fly over the deserts of California, the condor and the hummingbird.  If you ask the condor what the desert is like, it will describe death and carnage, blood, rot and decay.  If you ask the hummingbird what the desert is like, it will describe flowers dripping with sweet nectar and an unspeakable beauty hidden everywhere. Life is like that.  We find exactly what we are looking for.  We think it's the other way around.  We think it's random and "happening to us".  But the lens of our particular perception changes everything we see and all we experience. We literally find what we are looking for.  But we can't trick the looker.  All our positive thinking-new age-psycho babble doesn't focus the lens, our beliefs do. Life isn't "out there" happening to us.  It is in here, happening in us. If that's the case, perhaps we can stop our victim...