Tuesday, May 25, 2010

here's to you in gratitude

I am not one of those people who tries to negate the negative by coating it in a layer of gratitude.... I haven't quite resorted to thanking my bed for letting me sleep in it...but I have learned to give the negativity a wide enough frame so that I can see everything else that is going on....There is ample space for it all....and no reason to shut all the good stuff out because you wake up with the feeling of life sitting on your head after ten rounds in the ring...If I don't expand the frame, the whole day is held hostage to my negativity and cynicism. If the frame of awareness is large enough...the negativity is dwarfed by spaciousness, small mercies and Grace. Here's a toast to those elegant proportions of my life....

Sunday, May 23, 2010

belonging

.....David Whyte the poet speaks about us as being creatures of belonging...that we may only come to this belonging after long periods of exile and loneliness... That
loneliness seems to be the call to come into oneself...to stare into one's own face of rejection and fear of abandonment, depression.

The only way I survived through years and years of suicidal depression was to see my depression as something with its own life, being necessary and worthy of my attention and respect...to see it as a portal rather than something insurmountable...
It became my way, my spritual practice... not something I felt I needed to discard.. a mistake.

It has required an unrelenting attention... a practice of staying very physically present in this interface with my heavy hopelessness and a lack of enthusiasm for life at times.

There has always been an indescribable Grace in this willingness to stay present.

As if the Grace and the paying attention to what I am experiencing is the silent prayer of one part of myself to the other...

In this place I never felt totally alone... always coming to a reassuring sense of belonging...

The edge

The edge is where our heart is constantly caught off guard...In that vulnerability there are all sorts of possibilities. Opening to what is really there. Instead of the lie, the story we have made up...instead of the usual insulation that prevents us from having a straight conversation... a barefaced honest interaction. This means giving ourselves up in every moment.... giving up our position...risking the emptiness that annhilates all identity that is built on bewilderment and self-preservation...dying to ourselves every day...creating and recreating...

Saturday, May 22, 2010

"The holy contours of life"



The cumulation of the quality of awareness we bring to each moment defines our future...defines the quality of where we will end up and what we will be wearing
when we get there. Embodied awareness can contain ANYTHING and EVERYTHING....the worst internal scream; the most helplessly insane urge; as long as we stay present
with it and don't try to get away from it or hand it over to someone else. It's got to cook inside before it can be served. Believing in the holy contours of life....that it is all a very precise ploy just to get us to constantly pay attention.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

capricious deity

On the astrological reading of a suggestion that when making intense supplication the timing and answer may be delayed....not to despair....His reply is guaranteed, but in the way He chooses not the way you choose and the moment he desires, not the moment you desire....my friend's response was perhaps he resisted intense supplication because he did not want to be at the whim of a capricious deity...

We are capricious creatures it would seem.....capricious in love, in what we say and don't mean, intend to do and dont...it seems that the very fabric of life is capricious ... the Buddhists call it Impermanence....

And perhaps that deity that we supplicate to and implore is none other than a grandiose externalisation of ourselves....

Today I implore that deity to grant me the patience to wait for the answer.....

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

The Sufis speak about the joy that disappointment
brings... and this little paradox is definitely accessible...

....only if you are not trying to renovate or elevate the
source of your dissapointment - feeling it fully without
joking, busying, packing, eating, drugging, meditating,
etc.... it away....

...it can feel like a disorderly and greedy hole in the middle
of your midrif that you want to get away from at all costs...

... when all it requires is your physically embodied, unconditional
presence and attention....

...there is a joy so palpable that follows this emptying out.....

....it's a quiet thing!

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

mmm.... i have seen the truth....
and it doesn't make sense.....

it's only at the edge that you can
have any fresh experience.....
otherwise you are a prisoner of the
same...
breathing the same old air,
again and again.....

Sunday, May 16, 2010

my first post

i have decided to start a blog to present my ongoing passionate
pursuit of simplifying my life and anything that comes up on
the screen of my awareness...