angelbirdflies

“Don’t you know yet? It is your light that lights the worlds.” Rumi

N ot Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the east or the west, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is the placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and  that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being.

In 2016 my best friend died of cancer.  I sat at her bedside a few weeks before and said, "Mich, this is not how I thought the story would end."  She pressed my hand, answering, "Neither did I?"  A few weeks later she was gone.  This loss has turned me upside down and inside out.  Not just the loss of my lifelong friend and soulmate-sister but the overwhelming groundlessness accompanying her loss.  Suddenly nothing made sense.  All my belief structures and conceptual models simply collapsed. The only statement I could make with any real conviction was,  "I don't know".  With that there was little left to say.  Little to write.  Little to create. I gave away my loom, my paints, my art boards and supplies.  My well of creativity just ran dry, replaced by an edge of cynicism and apathy.   What would my sister tell me to do? I didn't know.  She was gone.  I couldn't pick up the phone and hear the reassuranc...

Driving to work last week I saw two signs in a nearby yard.  The first read, "Jesus Christ is the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to GOD except through HIM."   The next sign situated in the same yard along the walkway, read, "NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT." Of course, after I laughed aloud at the ironic signage, I was struck by what it unwittingly revealed. All too often religions espouse a monopoly on what is "right" or just and cling to it with closed fists, minds and hearts.  In one yard, two signs provided a perfect metaphor for how the story of Christmas, with it's little family looking for a place to rest and deliver a child, is all to often overlooked.   There is no room at the Inn.  "NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT!"   How often do our beliefs, ideologies and misplaced moralities ward off travelers who are merely looking for refuge or safe harbor?  How often do we think ourselves in possession of the truth and...

Death comes unbidden, like a salesman in the night marketing unwanted wares.  My soul's companion and dearest friend for two-decades died this year. At first grief fell like a torrential downpour, wet with tears.  Next, it arrived in a series of emotional tsunamis leveling everything in its wake. Eventually it settled into the ebb and flow of feeling. Loss is simply there, like a familiar friend who sometimes draws close enough to hold my hand and walk with me awhile before leaving and lifting the heavy mist of sorrow. With my sister's passing, all creativity ran dry.  My verbosity and delight in words simply stopped.  I gave away my paints, put my loom in storage and my notepads gathered dust. I simply had nothing left to say. Words, my long time companions, simply proved insufficient to this part of life's journey. They separate totality into  this  and  that ,  subject  and  object ,  here  and  there , ...

The resolve is to tell the truth. And the deeper truth. And the deeper truth.

Stop looking. Not in the next moment when you have what you are looking for. But now. In this moment. And you will discover that all you have ever sought is what you have been all along.

I have been unable to write. All words seem an unnecessary distraction, inadequate to the expansion back of them and woefully deficient. Loss, grief, confusion, joy, bliss, expansion, contraction, heart ache... all pass through the web of experience ... some linger longer than others. Such is the dance of the human. Perhaps if I add a few words here, the words will break free and give my heart room to breath once more. Save Save

 "Yell into the belly of the Earth", she told me, "she will listen and ease your aching sorrows". I yelled until I was hoarse. I was twenty-one. Burdens fell from careworn shoulders and we were sisters ever more.  The other day a friend entrusted me with a Kabbalistic myth. In the telling, 144 souls were created at the dawn of time. Those 144 souls eventually splintered into the multitudinous fragments of sentient life on planet Earth. Now I look out upon the mosaic of life and believe that my kindred spirits are my clearest reflections of the original soul from which we sprang.   Now she travels the final steps along the sharp, stony terrain of cancer, I walk with her, my heart aching.  I see ahead a field, beautiful and inviting, with tall grass, clear skies, shade trees and a small bubbling creek nearby. There are ample places to rest.  She is tired.  I say, softly, lean on me, we're nearly there. This grief has settled in and it's not wha...

Words. Insufficient, awkward, clumsy tools with which to communicate.  They have all but dried up.  Each one spilling forth is incomplete and one-sided, ill-suited to its task.  Drawing water from an infinite well, they cough wet sand on the surface of things, unable to match wholeness with anything other than division. Ah yes, but these are what we have. My beloved heart-sister, one of the greatest loves of my life, is leaving form and I, with deep tenderness, am breaking open, admitting that I know nothing and yet am so generously known as everything. She freely shared her love with me, year after year, until my own well was discovered to have been full all along. The heart never grows tired of loving, no matter the cost.  It pours love like an inexhaustible river filling the parched places so long tended by words alone. Now, I have no words to offer at this parting.  Each one spills out, empty and inadequate. The heart simply breaks and love spills o...

And then You are like this: A small bird decorated  With orange patches of light  Waving your wings near my window,  Encouraging me with all of existences's love --  To dance.  And then You are like this:  A cruel word that stabs me  From the mouth of a strange costume You wear;  A guise You had too long tricked me into thinking  Could be other -- than You.  And then You are...  The firmament  That spins at the end of a string in Your hand  That You offer to mine saying,  "Did you drop this -- surely  This is yours."  And then You are, O then You are:  The Beloved of every creature  Revealed with such grandeur -- bursting  From each cell in my body,  I kneel, I laugh,  I weep, I sing,  I sing.  -Hafiz

Beauty everywhere, Care in every detail. We imagine ourselves separate, Alone. While all the world is Conspiring, in Simple Wonder... Nothing is excluded.

The first time I met the Dalai Lama at 23, I had anticipated looking into his eyes and seeing how beautiful he was.  But when I looked in his eyes for the first time, and each subsequent time, I was utterly overwhelmed by how beautiful I AM.  It literally knocked all the human babbling straight out of my mind and cracked my heart wide open.  He offered a clear mirror with my own beauty reflected.  I have met with many clear seeing eyes who do this.  Children often do it. Nature does this.  And occasionally we have loved ones who do it as well.  I just spent an amazing week with my beautiful sister, beauty reflecting back and forth, exploding with joy, wonder and heart cracking splendor. This is the gift that we can bring to every moment.  The gift of clear seeing.  At core we are all infinitely beautiful.  When this is seen we discover ourselves already in Eden, inraptured through and through, by a radiance in which everything is ...

 So much beauty, there are no words.

When walking alone in nature for long periods of time something wonderful happens.   The mind, generally so full of it's own diatribe, begins to   s  l  o  w   down and the senses atune to the rhythm of life all around.   In the trees overhead, an avian fillabuster worthy of parliamant is in full force.  The wind whispers of her ongoing love affair with tree and cloud.  The bees buzz, matchmakers for flowers, busily dancing from bloom to bloom. Squirrels scurry amidst branches, hurriedly racing from perch to perch.   As the mind settles it's inward churning, a subtle shift takes place.  The listener, as a distinct other, no longer exists.  There is no "me" and nature, there is just T H I S... this grand arising, exactly as it is. The "me" is simply another note played through the unique instrument of self. A note in the vast and  indescribably beautiful symphony of life.  

Since everything is but an apparition Perfect in being what it is Having nothing to do With good or bad Acceptance or rejection, One may well burst Out In laughter. 14 cent. Tibet Long Chen Pa

"That which I am seeking  I already am." Imagine you are standing in the sunlight with eyes squeezed shut looking for the light. Open your eyes.