The Epitome of Truth - Alan Watts

Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are
thrust into the unknown.  Here all clinging to security is
compelled to cease, and whenever the past is dropped away
and safety abandoned, life is renewed.  Death is the unknown
in which all of us lived before birth.

Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret
of life.  It means that the past must be abandoned, that the 
unknown cannot be avoided, that "I" cannot continue, and
that nothing can be ultimately fixed.  When a man knows this,
he lives for the first time in his life.  By holding his breath, he
loses it.  By letting it go he finds it.

Alan Watts
From: The Wisdom of Insecurity:
A Message for an Age of Anxiety

With thanks to Whiskey River

Photo from Beyond the Fields We Know

 

Feel It All - Gina Puorro

 Can you sit with this ocean of grief?
Can you feel the gravity of what is happening
without rushing towards silver linings
or happy endings?

Let the wound bleed a little longer
without running to cauterize it
with certainty and guarantees.
Let the lacerations cut a little deeper
carving lessons of the great mystery
into your flesh
and lean in close
to the pain.

Can you soothe without numbing?

Paint new landscapes with your frayed nerves
as your tongue searches for words
in a language that you have never had to speak before.
Feel the searing truth that nothing is certain
not today
or tomorrow
not the very next breath.
It never was.
But in this moment
we cannot ignore that.
Death sits close right now
we have a front row seat
to the cycles
of living and dying.

Feel the shakiness of your trust
the gnawing fear
the sting of loss
the burning anger
the confusion leaving you gasping
for why
and how
and when will this end?

Dissolve into the stillpoint
beyond thinking and doing
and feel the exquisite ache
of the heartbreaking
heart-opening act
of surrender.

Gina Puorro
April 5, 2020

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Liminal Space - Alan Seale

 Liminal space is the waiting space.  That space between an
end and a beginning.  That space and time when we are
no longer where we were, yet we are not yet in a new place.
A space that can feel empty, where we can feel lost and
confused.  Yet when we are fully present to this waiting
time - when we are willing to accept this seeming emptiness
without conditions and let it talk to us - what has been
hidden can slip quietly into the open.  What has been a
mystery begins to be understood.  The "waiting space"
becomes a discovery space.

It can feel like you are caught in between.....you realize 
that something is going on in your inner awareness.

It is a "crossing over" space.  It's a transition space,
that can take many forms...

Liminal space can cause us to question the very core of
our beliefs...  It shakes us out of our habitual lives,,,  It
draws us out of what we have known...  The liminal space
is an invitation to surrender.....and navigate the uncertainty,
trusting that we will be supported...

This is the space where a new reality can be born.  It's a space
where we can finally let go of a way of being, a role, an identity,
or a belief, so that something new can be created [born]... letting
something completely dissolve, leaving us open and free to
discover what is waiting for us...

Alan Seale
Excerpts from: Transformational Presence

read the full article here

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
reflection of light in a shadow on the kitchen counter :)

Feel Your Feelings - Fred LaMotte

[.....]

It is good, it is very good
to feel precisely
what I am feeling,
even grief, and despair.
For when I am completely
what I feel,
there is transformation
and healing.

No darkness left

to penetrate,
for I am all night.
This is how light is born.
This is how the bud
breaks open, spilling
beauty from a wound.
This is how the chrysalis
frees a golden moth
from its season
of uncertainty.
This is how your tear
becomes the sky.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Uncertainty Is Hard on the Brain - Markham Heid

...what decades pf psychological research has borne out - is
that the human brain is uniquely vulnerable to uncertainty.
There's evidence that an inability to tolerate uncertainty is a
central feature of most anxiety disorders, and that uncertainty
stokes the sorts of "catastrophic interpretations" that fuel panic
attacks.  Some researchers have even argued that fear of the
unknown is the bedrock fear that human beings experience -
the one that gives rise to all other fears - and that a person's
ability to weather periods of uncertainty is a fundamental
characteristic of a healthy, resilient mind.

As the world grapples with.....the nightmare of Covid-19,
the rhythms and rituals [routines] of American life are
indefinitely disrupted...

...uncertainty disrupts many of the habitual and automatic
mental processes that govern routine action.  This disruption
creates a conflict in the brain, and this conflict can lead to a
state of both hyper-vigilance and outsized emotional reactivity
to negative experiences or information.  In other words,
uncertainty acts like rocket fuel for worry; it causes people to
see threats everywhere they look, and at the same time it makes
them more likely to react emotionally in response to those threats.

Uncertainty lays the groundwork for anxiety because anxiety is
always future-oriented...  The human brain has the capacity to
imagine all the worst things that could happen.  And the more
uncertainty there is - the more likely the brain is to conjure up
and fixate on the worst-case scenarios.

Even minor periods of unpredictability can cause significant
negative effects. ...the lack of control sends stress and anger
levels through the roof.  ...removing the element of uncertainty
makes one feel better.

The more people engage in worrying, the less they feel
confident in their ability to solve a problem and the worse
their solutions to that problem tend to be.  If you're going to
be spending six or seven hours a day worrying about the
coronavirus, you're going to be building up and strengthening
the neural connections that support this activity.  Worrying
breeds more worry.

So what can people do to combat the effects of uncertainty?
...focusing on the present can help dispel uncertainty and the
anxiety it foments.  Do things you enjoy.  Get out a book you've
been wanting to read, or watch a movie, or talk with a friend.
Occupy your brain with work, chores, entertainment, [creativity],
or other activities related to the source of uncertainty; something
that gets your brain into the present moment.

This may also be the perfect time to finally give mindfulness a try.
...embracing [what you are doing in] the moment can distract us
from worry and what may or may not happen. ..."letting go" of
things one has no control over may be the best way to shrink
worry down to a manageable size.

Markham Heid
From an article in Medium.com

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Wonder and Awe - Stephen Jenkinson

photo from unsplash.com

It's dark.  You are standing in a field...  This the midnight sky
of your younger, wilder days.  It is ablaze, aching with stars.
It is the vault of heaven, indigo sea of time pierced by light
from the other side.  The horizons are gone, and the Bridge of
Sighs, the one they say the dead walk to leave this world,
dazzles you.  Dew settles on your shoulders and you're
atremble, no longer full with comprehension and certainties.
Every idea you have seems too small for the world.  You
lived long enough to see a night such as this, you're stilled by
it.  There are unlikely companions in the field with you,
everyone quiet.  Someone looks up into the night sky and says:
"You see that star right there?  Could be it isn't there anymore."
Some things in life are too hard to see by yourself because they
happen every day, unwinding above your busyness, or because
you thought you knew them already.

Wonder takes a willingness to be uncertain, to be thrown.  We
have a lot of information these days, and few are enamored of
imprecision or subtlety.  But starlight traveling a bewildering
distance for so long that there is every chance that it doesn't
even exist anymore, and all of that having already happened,
and you standing there, your face blazed in the dark by a
starlight gone, seeing it all, what is and what isn't there: that
is a marvel, and surely that is how awe is born...

Stephen Jenkinson
From - Die Wise

Wanting A Way & Nowhere To Go - Richard Wehrman

Not yet, the not knowing
says, now is not the time
to know, this is what I've
given - uncertainty -
as your mind tries to scale the glass
mountain, impenetrable;
not glass, but quartz, not
quartz, but diamond, clear,
all the way through, but no
way to get in or out, not by
looking for a door, for a key;
frozen in the this or that,
wanting a way - your way -
when ways, plans, paths,
maps and agendas, are
destinations past, continents
left behind, earlier stages of
evolution, your childhood,
your schoolyards, your old
ways of loving; what is coming
you can't know, it has no
existence, the formless has
nothing to offer, as something
arrayed in the future, only
this arriving now, gone as
you try to grab on, arriving
again and again, unknown,
brilliant and new.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

He was crossing an unknown
land, one he no longer knew,
though the landmarks were
identifiable and familiar; it was
the mystery of what stretched
before him, as the distance
lessened, as time in the outward
sense contracted, but inwardly
expanded and deepened, as
goals and achievements hour
by hour, day by day, lost their
imperative, and what he had once
set as a destination had been
passed with only slight remarking.
Now he had no where to go, and
the distance between somewhere
and nowhere was steadily
decreasing; in a similar manner
his excitement, his sense of
the immensity of some thing he
could not name grew, as though
that which he searched for
his whole life unknowing, and
which he called by many names,
which had been refracted by
art, music, certain writings...
by men of gravity and honor,
drew near, but was none of these.
And he felt the thrill,
and it hummed in the air.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

~

Photo taken by my husband
 on a hike many years ago :)

Out Beyond Polarities - Rumi & Babka

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field.  I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in *that* grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'
doesn't make any sense...

Rumi

The great Persian poet and Sufi Mystic, Rumi, speaks in
this poem of a field, a clearing, a place empty of divisiveness,
empty of opposition, empty of what we think is certain.

Violence reverberates throughout the world in strains so familiar
that we often are complacent when there is another headline.

We don't often consider how our collective guilt extends the cruelty
and division in the world.  We are guilty of the failure to be
compassionate, and the polarity between the secular and the sacred,

and the unwillingness to be spiritually curious about our shared
responsibility for the violence we see in the world, [in the form of]
poverty, racism, homophobia; the violence of certainty, which claims
the superiority of being 'right'; the violence of oppression,
of absolutes, of nationalism.

We must meet each other in the space where we are all beyond
right and wrong [beyond polarities]... surpassed in the simplicity
of tenderness, the attentive word, the awareness that we each live,
in every moment, exposed to death.

We must practice deliberate compassion.
Each of us deserves to be valued and held as we are,
where we are...

Susie Paulik Babka, PhD

Associate of Religious Studies

Excerpt from an article she wrote in the Huffington Post,
"Out Beyond Ideas: A Field of Empathy in Response to Violence"
about the violent death of her father and 4 others in a
cycling accident.

The Descendant Current - Matt Licata

Let us not forget the descendant current, flowing into the unlit
places, the underworld, and the dark caverns of the psyche.  The
realm of dream, fantasy, imagination and creativity.  The
invitation here is one of embodiment - into the contradictions,
the chaos, and the deflation we must confront on any journey of
depth.

There is a cultural fantasy that we are supposed to know what to do
with our lives, that things, are supposed to be clear, that we are
supposed to feel solar and heroic and in control of the feelings that
wash through us.  But Love is full-spectrum and will equally
employ the energies of not-knowing, disappointment, and
reorganization as part of its revelation here.  The process of
dissolution is non-negotiable.  It is by way of this sacred washing
of the known that new forms can find their way here.

Inside the vessel of life, encrusted, worn out ideas and opposites
are washed away, such as silence over noise, oneness over multiplicity,
quiet over inner revolution, crystal clarity over shaky uncertainty, and
power over vulnerability.  While we may have our conditioned
preferences, Love does not share these biases and will use the entirety
of the emotional and phenomenal world to reach us.  Even in the
darkness, the numbness, the chaotic, and the mud, the wild,
untamed activity of the soul erupts.

It is natural and ordinary to disconnect from the downward movement
as we overly identify with the ascending, the upward, the light, and
the transcendent.  In the rush to exit immediate experience - for
something that is higher, purer, less messy, and less contradictory -
we turn from the waters of life and lose touch with Essence.

While it is natural to have a bias for one current over another, let us
not do so as the expense of fragmentation.  In ways the mind may
never fully understand, there is a luminous middle place where the
currents intertwine.  It is buried in a secret chamber inside your
own heart.  

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Vortex Art

Digitally altered
2011

Primal Scream

Like so many others these days my husband and I find ourselves at the edge of the abyss. It is the abyss of uncertainty, feeling like we are just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic that is about to sink into the dark unknown. Lately I have been feeling the weight of life circumstances that keep pulling and pushing me in directions that “I” don’t want to go in, to try to keep from drowning. Resistance to “life as it is” arises quite easily these days and shows up in a whole array of emotions. And I mud wrestle (aka *identify*) with the thoughts, feelings and story that I’m living at this moment, that isn’t going at all the way “I” had in mind. I have been unable to see everything in context, to step back out of the mud, and live from the space of Presence, letting this all blow through – all the things that I know I “should” be able to do, but am not doing. And all previous “awakenings” & awareness appear to be gone. I am back at square one, wondering what happened…

What it feels like inside is a deep primal scream, as if Being/Presence Itself is screaming to be let out, to express, to break through, to fully live Itself. It’s like a deep impulse for Life, something beyond the surface story of the “me” that keeps getting stuck in the mud. And thus this funky little picture that I did a couple of years ago to express this deep internal scream that I was feeling back then. But what can this be? - this primal scream. Is this really the ego resisting, wanting life to be different than it is… Or is this Being – the Essence of Life - rising up from what feels like a deep place of primal existence, feeling suffocated by current life circumstances… I don’t know. Maybe a little of both, and maybe I am deluding myself. Some would say it is the ego, the false self that is creating this, feeling these feelings - the mind-identified state. But WHO is identified? And WHO is mud wrestling here? If it’s really all the Self then WHO is screaming to be free? I don’t know. And that’s part of the humbling of this present life experience, I just don’t know. All I know is what I am experiencing in this moment. And it feels like something bigger, deeper than ego that wants freedom from the constraints, the limitations of life as it is being lived at the moment. And I know that it’s not a matter of what “I” want, but is this *really* what LIFE wants! And WHO is questioning this? Once again, I don’t know… But I know I need to get in touch with whatever “it” is…

Non-duality teachers say that the remedy is to come into present moment awareness, into the NOW of the moment, to live life as it is with radical acceptance, to just rest in Awareness and allow, to not get entangled in it, to not identify with the story, etc. Yes, I know this, and it’s easy to regurgitate these words of the masters, but it still doesn’t explain WHO is screaming from the inside, and what does it *really* want… Often I feel like I am living somebody else’s present moment – being dragged along by life circumstances (like being dragged through the mud behind a run-away horse) that have been *created* by other people that I am supposed to just accept. And so I engage in thinking that this should not be happening and could have been prevented – I know, I know – irrelevant storytelling. And so for me it's not just about “present moment awareness” where “I” (ego) am aware of the surface life events of the present moment – life being lived - but also an inner awareness of what is aware of this moment, an awareness of inner Presence – the ever-present Awake Aware Being that is aware of all this – that is apparently living & experiencing all this, and evidently trying to get my attention – or so I interpret this primal scream.

Admittedly, I have become so preoccupied and numbed by the spirit-killing demands and distractions of chaotic living (I know you can relate :) that I have been on automatic and haven’t been spending much time in Stillness, deeply listening to this Voice that is calling from within. I haven’t been walking my talk, what I know in my Heart to be true… So it seems I am being called to the womb of Stillness again, to listen, to hear, to rediscover the Truth again… For me that is the “remedy” – to return to the space of inner Stillness and just listen to the call, the longing of the Heart – to commune with Stillness (Being/Awareness/Presence) and just ask to be shown the Truth of the situation…

Yo – Mr. Wizard, what’s all this racket going on behind the curtain?

I’ll let you know what I hear… :)