reminiscing

...We are participatory beings who inhabit a participatory reality, seeking relationships that enhance our sense of what it means to be alive. While we believe and cling to a perceived truth, we're unavailable to hear anything new.

Feeling irritated, restless, afraid, and hopeless is a reminder to listen to the heart more carefully.

People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all.

The idea of life is that we continually get the teachings that we need to open our heart. To the degree that we didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting our soft spot, how to stop armoring our heart, we're given this gift of teachings in the form of our lives, to give us everything we need to open further.

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness there is, how much space.

Unfortunately, gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us...

[22 APR '08]

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awakening

“I am not simply a human being. I am a human becoming.”

SAMUEL AVITAL, Kabbalist

Twelve minutes past midnight. Navy blue sky hung prickled with tiny disembodied lights. Large, pearlised eye of the night hovered amongst them beyond the open French doors. Its cool, burnished light danced with the white chiffon curtains, casting a trail of eddying shadows over a monochrome room. Soft, electrum glow provided just sufficient illumination to make out two bodies lying in bed.

Heavy sobbing hung in the thin veil of moonbeams. An urgent, raspy voice called, “Honey?!”

Eyes, lashes gleaming with wet, glided under soft covers of flesh. I swung my head side to side. Slowly. Painfully.

“Honey what’s wrong?” But the distressed sobbing did not subside. “Sweetie!? What's wrong?! Wake up!”, a gravelly voice called gently, but urgently.

“I want to go home!”, mouthed my lips thick with sleep, voice heavy with tormented longing.

He propped himself up, “Darling, you are home!?”, he muttered perplexed as he caressed my hair.

I opened my eyes, looked around at the dim shapes enveloped in a weave of electronic red and pearly beams, droplets drifting down my cheeks one after another, “Yes?!… but, … I want to go - home!?”

His thumb wiped the trickle of distilled liquid off my cheek as I uttered, now wide-eyed, “I don’t know why I’m saying this??!…”, as I sat up in bed.

Deep was my longing for the land of my memories and the dwelling-place of my desires.

In the reverberation of this night I awoke from a protracted childhood. Childhood of a different kind.

“This skin is too tight!”, I squealed silently.

All He said was, “Time to kiss your soul good night!”

in veritas

“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.”
  

WILLIAM BLAKE, “Auguries of Innocence”

My visions became my life, rather than the other way around. They whispered the secret of ages. I wrote not so much what I was experiencing, but what I was remembering — what I forever knew.


“Know ye not that ye are gods!?”

I am a messenger. I am here on behalf of the error of my past, serving out of duty, not pride. I serve the One I am.

I wonder if there has ever been anyone who has stood at the top of a very high mountain, with the endless horizon marking the border between this visual reality and the unseen of their imagination, who has then been able to return to the banality of life?

Once I had seen the whole, the detail no longer contained sufficient sustenance to keep my attention, my happiness, my self at that level.

The need to step away and take in the wholeness of my existence overpowered even my basic needs, for food, for shelter, clothing and even, human company. The aloneness was intoxicating. It was as if my consciousness had attached itself to the virtual horizon and all my attempts at focusing on everyday were thwarted by a constant pull ‘out’, the need to see ever more. The need to see all.

“…as the light of day births colors into being, then shall I came to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean…”

If all things return to the One, where does the One return to? …

Ω

musing

I suppose I could say that I am one of the lucky ones for whom the Diamond Thunderbolt instantaneously and involuntarily granted spiritual awakening. Abruptly it burst clear the path to intuitive insight, seemingly dispelling the need for external discipline.
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Someone once said that there is a supreme difference between destiny and fate. Our destiny is to go through preordained changes. Our fate is how we choose to go through them. Faith is a matter of belief and you are what you believe in. Some of us don’t have much of a choice either way.

I constantly see possibilities layered all around me, and like a child in a kaleidoscopic candy store don’t know where to turn next, where to start exploring – I want it all! I want it now! This life so short, so much to see and do. I know that I must use it wisely before it is cast upon the beach of time. And yet, my indecision to chose a way, a path, feeds on a stifling fear that I may not choose the ‘right’ option. How can I be certain that the one I settle on will be the "correct one’’?! The fear is numbing, rendering my actions impotent. Barren.

But the path, unstoppable like spilled water, writhes and meanders to find its own way. And trials are but lessons that we failed to learn, presented once again. Not as punishment, but as a second chance, so that where we’ve made an ineffective choice before, we can now make a better one, and thus escape the pain that our previous choice had brought to us.

In the end, other than being the best I can be at whatever makes me happy, I'm not concerned. After all, the one thing I truly excel in, the one thing I excel in above everyone else, above all - is in being me!

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first glimpse

The first time I got a glimpse of the future, I was three years old. In the balmy inkiness hung countless sparkles of light. As I spun in the spot with my chubby little arms stretched out to the sides reaching out for the world, head thrown back with blond ringlets bouncing up and down on my shoulders and face pointing to eternity, I wondered how far those glowing specks were. What was behind them? What did the end of the night look like? And if there was an end, what came after it(?)

The vision I had that evening was of the mundane bits of family life. The scene played out in a strange kind of fast-forward motion on a see-through holographic-like screen floating in front of my eyes.

For decades I didn't realise how strange it was that my grandmother, my second mother who brought me up, didn't blink an eye when I'd rattle off to her the events of the next day, or week, or month. Nor did she ever say anything once it had all happened just as I said. The first time she made a comment on my visions, and said so much more, things that made me realise that maybe I was different after all, was on her deathbed about a decade later.

Up until then the experience seemed totally natural, normal, if there is such a thing at all. I didn't talk about the visions beyond home, and they quietly unfolded as seen.

Later that same year when my grandmother died, for the very first time I questioned a vision I had. It was one of a handful over my lifetime that was about me personally. And, it was the first. As much as I wanted the vision to be true, I didn't think there was any possibility of it eventuating. All facts pointed to the impossibility.

Within the next few months I was to change hemispheres. The boy in my vision was not going anywhere.

But what do we mere mortals know about the space-time continuum? About 17 years later my life played out the vision. Or is it the other way around(?)