Pine

Dried grass sways under tall trees

Death displays itself through life


Speaks about tidal waves, sun rays 

and spiders weaving threads of night

A ceremony to mark Things as they become illusion

Here are pine cones for your grandparents' graves

A phantom peeks through the window

She is you. He is me. It is us.

An offer

Surrender is an offer not a command. I tend to resist surrendering, letting go. I scapegoat it with all the things that go “wrong” in my life. Surrender gives me a chance to live in harmony with what is. It asks me to trust. It brings me back to the ever-expanding present moment. But when I command myself to surrender, it has the opposite effect. “Just get over it! Let it go already!” I tighten up. I mentally analyze all the possibilities. I attempt to predict outcomes. Succinctly, I freeze. I’m very good at making it appear that I’m surrendering; I do this by not actually acting on anything. I tell myself I’m waiting for magic. I gather lots of information. I don’t surrender at all. I hide. 

Yet I can surrender without command, without fear of what I might lose in letting go. When the gentle breath of light blows through my heart and says, “Rest. Be,” I find ease in that place, an ability to release. Sometimes letting go does take many nights sitting in silence, doing nothing externally, but internally fighting a battle to exhaust my habitual mind into finally giving up. Yet I’m learning that surrender can also be an active verb; it’s not simply letting go. The energy of possibility infuses surrendered action and guides each step taken from inside its wisdom. Like inhales and exhales, it is a moment-to-moment activity, constantly reshaping itself around us, providing new information. It is up to us to follow surrender’s gentle guidance, to let what offers itself in the present inspire our actions. 

Collectively, we are moving into a time of immense change. We are like a dying plant being replanted in new soil. As we settle into the new environment, some of our leaves are bound to shrivel, die, fall away. Saving these dead leaves would be ridiculous, hoping to make them come alive again by some alchemy of the mind. Completions, dying, are inevitable. Now is a time to surrender to what is already gone. Surrender offers us an opportunity to mentally and emotionally finish up what is complete. It shows us how to wait, how to take subtle steps, to water what isn’t visible yet. In surrendering, we can gently discover the possibilities that are inherent in each moment. 

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How to Traverse the Night

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I’m listening to the silence. It buzzes lightly, a quietness louder than sound. These phases of no-thingness used to be nightmarish. Dark, electric, weird. I’d flail about in confusion, panicking. Now, I hear something in the rich and textured stillness. Unnerving and rewarding, otherworldly yet familiar. I can’t fight it. I don’t want to anymore. 

How to traverse the night came to me while sitting on a sunlit patch of grass beneath a clear blue sky. It gave itself to me as both a question and an answer. I remembered  a dream I once had where I stood by a cabin at the edge of an illuminated, night-bathed forest. Animals and strange beings of energy and light surrounded me as I watched my city in the distance burn under a blood red sky. I felt safe and yet also deeply grieved. 

I don’t claim to know the way through darkness. I only know my darkness. Having become intimate with it over thirty years, I simply share how, once it enters me, I make my way through it. 

** 

What is Illusion: Everything inside the night is unreal. Yet each image and sensation along the inner path sends sparks toward you, compelling you to catch flame and burn. So obscured and ignited, you might then tumble down a rough slope or step into quicksand, or rush into the arms of a mental demon so vast that you create a prison in its embrace. Unreal, all of it. Keep walking, even while you burn and flutter in and out of yourself. 

What is Desire: Everything you’ve ever wanted, ever created or destroyed, is an illusion. When night comes, you must let it all go. The dreams, the desires and the deaths you’ve experienced only weigh you down. Release them. It is safer, and far easier, to traverse the night when you are light. 

What is Reality: You are real. A soul, a frequency of energy, transporting itself across dimensions, every breath another world. Live inside those realms of inhale and exhale. They are the closest you will ever come to union in physical form.

What is Bright: The night is actually very bright. So illuminated and insistent that it appears unseeable. Look at it anyway. Out beyond the illusions lies an expanding place where you can rest. Silence. 

What is Love: When you wake up completely inside the darkness, love is there. You become the vast vision and perfect void, and nothing is impossible. Inside the night, you learn to See, to keep looking. To not turn away. When you experience this Staying with yourself, love opens inside every unnameable thing, even violence and death, and there is nothing else to do but bring everything back to wholeness. 

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What Earth takes, she transforms

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What Earth takes, she transforms. She holds all truths. In her, redemption steams and boils. She denies nothing entry. Ignores nothing. If moments are meant to be completed before rolling into new moments, she does that too. She breathes and we remember. She is still and we find peace. She makes light through reflecting the stars, the sun, the moon off her multicolored surfaces. She uses everything as fuel for another creation. Burns away the dross. Marks the time with seasons - they turn, then stay, then turn again. One and the same, we are. Cyclic. Reflective. Multi-factorial. Endlessly diverse. Incrementally evolving, slow and steady. 

Change becomes her. She creates it, allows it to transform her and then adjusts. Inside death and destruction, she cocoons a new relationship with herself. Her focal point is on the no-thing. Eyes everywhere, seeing herself. A bird calls and dives for a fish. I look at you and she sees herself.

An orb of dark and light, she is energy turned material. Magnificent bulk and weight, revolving in deep space. She displays herself to the stars in grand satisfaction. Time means nothing to her. She is trillions upon trillions of atom clusters, bursting and mutating their way into Now and out again. 

What Earth takes, she transforms. Know this: Everything humans have left here, created here, destroyed here, she can digest. Slow and true, she writes an everlasting song. Even in her star-death, she will evolve. We create, through her, a new world. Our belief and faith, our thoughts, our reverent actions are nodal points. She has weaved a template, a grid, a set of vibrating instructions; as we attune ourselves to that frequency, the new path shows itself to us. We live into that new world. This galactic, Gaian guidebook is our home. We walk on the instruction manual and it sends us direction. Ground yourself in her. Plant your roots deep and twine with other Earth souls. Then, in preparation, the roots split apart. We disintegrate now. Trust that we can give ourselves to Earth. Remember: what Earth takes, she transforms. She ingests our death, disease and destruction and breaks them into higher and higher frequency. Earth made this choice to be a living transformational entity. She has become so dense that she must liberate. So it is with humans, with all life. That is why we’re here. It happens Now. 

Soon it will be that: What humans take, they transform. Feel the truth of that vibrate through your body. We are becoming new beings. We are transformation bearers too. Now, what we take, we consume. Soon it will be that what we take, we transform. Follow the guidebook of Earth’s frequency. Harmonize your rhythms to hers. Now it is time to learn how to pull everything we once denied and feared into ourselves and mindfully build a bridge between hate and love, dishonesty and truth, life and death. We can do this. Our hearts are linked to Earth's ancient/future beat. She knows the way.

Shifts Ahead

A few years ago, on my rush hour commute to the night shift, I slowly drove past orange construction signs that read “Shifts Ahead.” The road crew had placed a sign every couple miles along my route to work because they were widening the roads and reorienting the lanes. I was thrilled every time I saw these signs. The road work lasted for months, but no matter how many times I read “Shifts Ahead” I always breathed a sigh and shook my head in agreement. I felt seen by those large hexagonal messengers. Strange, yes to feel understood by a road sign. It was a message - a truth that shifts were ahead. Life was reverberating back to me what I already knew: that the changes rapidly happening in my life were going to keep coming, dressed in the deep, bright, sometimes heart-breaking colors of death and rebirth. To take the construction metaphor further, life was saying to me “Your lines are going to be redrawn. You are expanding.” The world we live in now is changing irreversibly, upheaving and reordering itself. It is a time of revolution, of recalibration. Shifts are ahead for everyone. 

The Talmud says, “Wherever you look, there is something to be seen.” If you look just right, everything speaks to you. Not always through block letters clearly written on bright orange backgrounds. But life does speak. In waves of grief that come off a woman who just stopped crying in her car and now stands behind me in the grocery line. In deep thrums of peace from the calm couple talking at the table next to me. In the clear buzz of the fly as it spins in circles around my head, bringing me back to the present moment. In the cries of protest and anger that rise from the collective. These big and small moments are messages. Gifts of wisdom. I seek to love them all, no matter the appearance, and hold them in my heart as fuel for each next action I take.

We often look for guidance everywhere but here, in anytime but Now. We go to therapists for help unraveling the messages of our emotions. We attend church to reach for higher realms and to understand the truths of ancient gods. We read books to find reprieve from our endlessly repeating, often unwanted, thought patterns. What I have discovered is that we are surrounded by all the wisdom and guidance we’ll ever need right now. Every decision we make, every person we encounter, every task we complete (or don’t complete) hold within them what we need to see and understand. Susan Sarandon’s character, in a movie that I can’t name at the moment, says something like, “What I want in a relationship is to be witnessed, to be seen for who I am.” This is what life wants also - to be seen. One of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves and others is to become observers of life. When we see what is before us, when we take it into our hearts and feel it fully, we expand. And in that expansion, we can respond more wisely, love more deeply. We can walk with courage toward the shifts ahead of us. 

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What the fly said

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My awareness of the fly shifted this morning. Here is what I discovered. 

The fly’s constant buzzing and rapid movements, the zipping around my body in dizzying patterns - all these give off the perception of a large creature, one with enough power to disrupt my quiet space. Its soft landing on my skin makes it seem drastically larger that it is. As it tickles and fans me, it causes such an annoying sensation that I feel, for a moment, that I’ve been attacked. 

This morning as I watched a fly land on a flower, I understood it differently. The (average) fly is quite small, so tiny it can land on a delicate flower petal and walk the length of it without causing the petal to sag or shift under its weight. It can launch itself into the air again without perceptible sound, no sighing or heaving, not even a “get ready for take off” shift of its insubstantial frame. Yet when it’s in flight again, the tiny insect monopolizes the air, its sounds echo and pulse. It fills up the space around me with rapid vibrations and grabs my attention each time it comes to rest on my skin. It is there and not there simultaneously. 

I’m struck by the power of perception. How the practically weightless fly seems immense as it manipulates the air and rides the light. Perhaps the fly purposefully obscures an honest perception of itself. Being so tiny, it makes more evolutionary sense for us to perceive it as large and powerful, not small and weightless. Whether the fly is purposeful in its obfuscation or not isn’t my point though. What is interesting is that it can shift our perception of it: one second it's a quiet dot on a fine petal and the next minute it’s a giant sound in our ears and a distracting movement on our skin. Maybe we’re meant to perceive the fly as both large and small, powerful and delicate. 

This may sound funny, but the other day, I had a random thought float into my awareness: What if flies have something to teach me? 

Formula for feeling

Speaking kindly isn’t easy on days when everything feels heavy inside. Is it better to be quiet then? On certain days, it would be simpler (safer?) to only move my body, gesture, smile, frown or crease my brow. Sometimes I can say to my lover, friend or family member, “I’m having a bad day, so I might not have much to say.” But that is a form of denial, of shutting down; I have not spoken the full truth. It’s not bad to feel heavy emotions. It’s normal. Still, the patterned, perfectionist part of me judges those emotions and can’t see past their ruse of all-encompassing control.

The words we speak vibrate the air around us, tuning it to different frequencies, shifting the dynamics of a situation, a conversation, a moment in time. What am I to do if what vibrates inside me, moves the air outside in a way that could pass on the hurt, negativity or pain? How do I stop this extenuation of heaviness? 

I sit. I quiet myself. I open into the feeling while asking my heart to flow beyond words into being, and I listen to my breath. The in and out. I name what I feel. Today it is loneliness, longing, sadness, irritation, disappointment. I breathe in and out. I observe the thoughts and beliefs that surround the feelings. I wait. I keep breathing. In the clear moments, the millimeters of freedom before a feeling rises again, I remember that the observer inside me does not identify with, believe or judge these feelings. I remember that I am not the heaviness, the grief, disappointment or longing. I repeat this process, until I’m able to resume interactions and actions again.

I’ll use this formula for feeling until I leave Earth. Heavy emotions are intricately linked to this human journey. We cannot escape them, and they often come when we least expect them. Yet we can continually remember that they do not control, define or confine us. When we let them, emotions find their way, effortlessly, through our bodies and away. Like the breath - in and out, forever. 

Liberated

I’m listening to the smooth hum of the ceiling fan, feeling my heels against the rough fabric of the footrest, noticing the dryness of my lips. I hear a distant roar of a truck and high-pitched bird chirps. I’m surrendering to this moment, to my heart's glow of satisfaction at being present with sensation and feeling, without agenda or expectation. In this ease, I search my heart for shadowy goldmines so that I can extract the familiar nuggets of old fears, stories or beliefs. A breeze picks up outside. Life makes itself clear to me as a series of moments, each one pulsing out into the next. What I choose here affects there, and so on. Ripples into infinity. Yet the beauty of the ripple is that it can expand, shift direction or change momentum when it makes contact with other choices, other now moments, which make new ripples. The soul is not like stone. It is like water, a shimmering essence of creation, nourishment and change. 

I’ve been expecting myself to feel a certain way in these solitary times, anticipating that this quiet will take me back to ancient places that I’ve already mined for jewel and shadow. Yet what if a new birth is taking place and this solitude asks to be experienced differently? What if the tidal wave of a new life is integrating the fading ripple of my old world, and as it washes over the completing patterns, it asks me to become something else entirely? What if instead of going back into the old emptied mines, I shut them down? Then, with deep gratitude for the treasures found there, I can make my way, liberated, into the unknown.