gratitude to Ellie Stone for this photo of rock formation in Nevada When the heart is pierced by loss, don’t be so quick to look for your strength in a shield. Allow the grief to have you. Go deeper than need. Meet the yearning. Down here, in a land of no half measures you may feel you’re entirely broken, without any power except to simply be present and breathe. Sometimes the heart opens so far that when it falls there’s nothing to save it from the dark embrace. Surrender here is no longer a maneuver, something to achieve or avoid, but an inescapable reality. You don’t get to set the pace. It takes just as long as it takes. Some imagine this overwhelm of all the heart’s defenses, a failure, to be avoided at all costs. But have you tried it, really? When nothing in you wants to avoid this, run from this, there’s peace to be found that doesn’t depend on absence of turmoil, freedom that doesn’t depend on flight. So bow to the door that shuts in your face, the hand that pries away your grasp. Some of us need to be refused our total desire before we’ll drop all the way through the bottom to the groundless source of our love. Here we learn the song that can never be understood by a heart that shies away from pain or seeks control. Entitled to nothing, graced by everything. Living into this, we live into this. Entitled to nothing, graced by everything. Living into this, we live into this. ~~Luke Anderson photo of sleeping goddess from lost gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, England Mother, I used to think you were a home I lost, a long time ago. One night you came as the moon and showed me no-one ever leaves their source. Beginning, middle and end all right here. My life began again. I knew where to turn, my heart nested in yours. Your body is every changing face, every ant, river, feeling. Then one day, afraid again, I came to you. But you said it is time now to forget about safety, time to be as the sun. ~~Luke Anderson His name is the old way. Not the ancient, tap root to source, worthy of honor, elder, way. His is the tired, worn out, forlorn and ready to die way. Scanning the past and future incessantly, everywhere his suffering, theirs. “Maybe this time", he says, drawn by the intoxicating aroma of the next hope. But his imaginings are saturated with a great suspicion, and his body shudders once again, afraid of everything, even joy. He thinks he knows what he wants, but everywhere there is too much dust. The very effort to see just muddies the water. It is time we released him from his duties, his burden, his impossible task: the effort to secure certainty in that which is always changing. How to speak of the new way, ancient way? How to describe that which is seen only where there is no thing, that which is heard only in silence? Somehow, we find our way. The core glows, and truth beckons. Aware as the still source, empty of content, the pen moves by itself. Alert, we abide as pure potential, a vast presence whose nature is intelligence. Despite appearances, there is only one of us. We are curious but not too interested, for desire can get so quickly ahead of itself. We are unmoving yet contain all that moves, unflinching, undefended, utterly intimate with even the smallest turn of the wheel. Here there is no possession, no control, no avoidance of pain, no race to get there. This then, the great choice: to relinquish everything, all hope, all fear, and rest as the choiceless, the choice which has already been made. This is no head in the clouds, repelled by the earth or humanity passivity. This is home in the gutter as well as the throne moment to moment devotion to the love, unfolding. Everything, honored, recognized, nourished. This is moment to moment devotion attention deep listening to the love, to the choice that has already been made. Despite appearances, there is only one of us. Here is clarity, freed from preconception, revealing infinite possibility. To open to it all, without promise, this becomes the great willingness. Purpose is clear. Time is no more. All is well. Free, and yet fully here. ~~Luke Anderson gratitude for this artist's impression of a black hole by L. Calçada “Enough, we are already enough.” Freed from not enough, our world is transformed. This the resounding call to calm anxious ambition that never was able to hide from the knowledge of its inevitable failure. “Enough, we are already enough.” This the medicine to heal the chaos of overwhelm. “Enough, already enough.” We wait, in trust that what is ours will come to us, and yet no passivity in this patiently awake. Alert in surrender to intimate direction, moved in vital clarity, a quiet assurance arises from confidence in no control. ~~Luke Anderson Drink first at your well. Be still for once and find out who you are. Interrupt the lonely assertion that insists on a desperate reach for love. Stop and feel it all. Be unafraid to descend and know the deeper, darker waters. Welcome back those abandoned sorrows. Guide them with discipline and tenderness toward the molten core where clarity is born in dissolution. Even as you find yourself ground down again and again follow the thread of undeniable truth all the way through. You already have the courage. You’ve seen too much by now to return for long to the dull drumbeat the habitual comfort of what you once thought you knew. Align with your strength, the radiance of your creative will, the passion that can be counted on, the choice for nothing less than reality. Throw it all on this fire If you want to trust your heart. Discover that what you are has enough space for this, is being carved out by this, blazed in the agony ecstasy of this, for love. ~~Luke Anderson
gratitude to this art 'Great Wave off Kanagawa' by Katsushika Hokusai
Sometimes I make a great effort to accomplish something, only to find my progress awkward, slow and filled with obstacles. At other times even the smallest willingness on my part propels an action forward with ease and potency, as though unseen currents carry it forward with unstoppable momentum.
I have often grieved the apparent slow pace of progress made by us humans, the raising of our consciousness to a truly integrative and generative world-view. Are we going to remain as a species so bogged down by ignorance, so fascinated by fear and lost in our frenzy of consumption that we lay waste much of the beauty in the world? No matter how righteous some of us may imagine ourselves to be, each day we get to take a sober look at ourselves in the mirror of our lives and see aspects of the same fragmented consciousness that reveals itself globally in such gross inequities, ecological ignorance and desperate violence. Who can know whether the darkness we see now is evidence of our collective failure to evolve or whether we are in the deepest night before some grand dawn? Like an iceberg, our progress can be largely invisible to us but reaching deep under the surface is a form that may one day be revealed. We all reap the fruits of countless efforts by ancestors who strived for an accomplishment never to witness it in their own lives. Whether or not we get to see obvious shifts for the good within our time on this earth, it seems like our task is still the same, to participate wholeheartedly in true and inspired lives, to build together a more loving reflection within and without, day by day gratitude for this photo of hobbit house in Wales www.simondale.net Welcome.
You are welcome here. You belong here. Relax. You get to relax. And show up. Show up because we need you. We need you to be exactly yourself. We need your discernment. We need your trust in that calm and steady voice in the heart. It speaks to you from the still dwelling eye in everything and everywhere. Feel the longing. Let it penetrate you absolutely, even though it feels like a splinter that will break you in two. When you find the splinter is made of love, who would pull it out? Open up your chest of treasures and share as though they belong to everyone else, for they do, as you do. There is no personal belonging. Belonging includes all of us, for it is our home, yours and ours, together. Such relief when all is said and done. Empty yourself. Fill up with everyone. ~~Luke Anderson What do you do when you’re backed into a corner, when all around the walls seem to grow taller, the knot undoable, the maze inescapable?
We can become desperate when our struggles to escape just entangle us further like quicksand. In the no-man’s land of repeated failure, it’s easy to get addicted to distraction or denial, or stuck in depression. Our society excels in methods to distract attention from the crisis in consciousness, with the very few hours most have outside of work saturated with media and a variety of other tranquilizers. What if instead of attempting to push away the discomfort we instead just open to it exactly as it is? If, instead of resisting its gravity, we allow our experience to be just as it is, surrender draws us into the hidden depths of our being. Here the walls, the knots, and the maze collapse. Right here in the darkness of our unknowing there is a path leading directly through our fear and pain to a natural intelligence that is unafraid of our bad dreams and therefore free to respond to them. On the one hand I find a small comfort in the idea that our so often insane and dissociated human consciousness has evolved to the stage that we at least bring attention to the honoring of our planet one day a year. However, even well meaning conversations about environment usually betray a profound disconnection from reality. In the words of Wendell Berry, “The idea that we live in something called the environment is utterly preposterous… environment means that which surrounds or encircles us… a world separate from ourselves, outside us. The real state of things, of course, is far more complex and intimate and interesting than that. The world that environs us, that is around us, is also within us. We are also made of it; we eat, drink and breathe it; it is the bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.”
So what will it take for us as a species to behave as though we truly belong here? What does it take for each one of us to belong in our lives, in our communities, in our world? Apparently we are welcome to engage in behaviors that solidify the fantasy of our disconnection, and free to entertain notions that keep us paralyzed in a sense of unworthiness – but no matter what we do or where we believe we go, we can never actually leave who we are. And the relief is that who we are in truth is exactly where we belong. How could it be any other way? We imagine that we make ourselves, make the best me that we can and find somewhere to fit, and yet the path of belonging is the path of surrendering that ‘me’, and all the craziness that comes from it, into the growing and humbling recognition of the one we belong to. I remember about 20 years ago when I first learned how to talk with trees, waterfalls, springs, and other nature relatives. For many years I had envied those people who reported a genuine ability to communicate like this. I believed that they must be somehow more special or possess some kind of psychic ability that someone like me had lost in the distancing of my ancestors from the earthy belonging of indigenous ways. And my deep sorrow at the seemingly unstoppable drive to consume the planet for profit had me more often than not weeping with shame when I was in beautiful nature places, imagining myself as a human unwelcome, a kind of parasite, and yet desperate to communicate my sadness for what we are doing. And yet somewhere along the path, life’s merciful but ruthless grinding down of my sense of separation opened up a chink through which I could begin to hear a new stream. And the first words nature had for me? Were they an admonishment for our poisonous human disrespect for the mother earth? No. The same theme came through time and again, whether from twisted old pines on the Mendocino coast, from a hawk family, or from a freshwater spring in the mountains: “in the center of your heart lies the umbilicus of the mother of all creation. Trust the one voice that abides here. That voice is yours, as it is ours, and it speaks with you now.”… “Do you not see that only ignorance is served through perpetuating a sense of humanity’s unworthiness here? You cling to the very sense of separation that gives rise to all the twisted toxic confusion that devours the earth, and call this humility? It is not arrogance to assume that you can talk with us your relatives, as one of us. It is not arrogance to recognize and acknowledge that true nature which is given to you through no special privilege, but as your birthright.”… “How do you embrace all that you are, all that you have been? It is impossible if you position yourself outside of the heart.” And so my prayer this earth day, is that we drop deeply into the kind and essential truth of our belonging, that very source of beauty and creativity from which we may see and follow a way through into a world of human belonging. |
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