I sat amongst friends
yet I felt that I was seperate from them. Seperate in the sense that they looked to me for something, they looked to me for something that they thought was not in them. How can that be true? I can't explain it to every one, or at least not everyone will believe me. It's all inside you I say, how can anyone else have the key?
I was with this group and I broke away to sit on a bandstand, a staggered set of seats made for viewing an event. And I looked out but it wasn't a playing field that I saw, it was the ocean spanning in every direction. From that ocean a great blue whale emerged and pushed straight up, lifting a bird on the tip of his nose. The whale came back down and set the bird gently but awkwardly on the oceans surface. This happened again but more sideways, this little white pelican getting a strange ride with his large friend.
And as I sat there on the bandstand I was overcome by such a feeling of happiness. I closed my eyes and I could feel tears coming through, and I felt self consciousness too. To be a man crying for no real reason, to in fact never have a real explanation for anything. Why do we always have to explain everything? And why do we need to know the answer? Some believe thinking to be an advanced state, and some know it to be a state of severe limitation.
I only knew one thing, this feeling in my heart. It's the kind of feeling that no question can touch, in fact no thought can exist simultaneously with this feeling.
And then I woke up and literally launched out of bed, the alarm for 6AM was going off. I grabbed my phone and my hands knew how to make it stop. I returned to the bed for three or four minutes of warm denial, and then I got up and put four layers on my torso, two on my legs, one on each foot, and one on my head.
We have a friend staying on the couch, so this morning there would be no smoothie for me. Our blender sounds like a mechanized demon, especially in contrast to the stillness of the morning. To me it's OK, having already set my intention of facing the day bravely and spaciously. Yet I won't inflict it on a sleeping beauty. I'm willing to sacrifice my morning drink to give that surfer another hour in dream land.
Perhaps it was a dream like mine, it was probably entirely different though. Perhaps we're all connected in this five person home, or perhaps we're all alone. It seems to be just a matter of perspective, really I know we're connected, I'm just working with my reluctance to admit that this world goes so far beyond our hollow stories of how it works.
Walking to work I felt the tiredness in my legs from a yoga class more than 24 hours ago. I stretched upward with my neck and head, clicking and clacking and finding a bit of space. It was still dark, it takes until about 8am for the light to come with the Solstice just behind us.
A strange thing happened when I got to the bakery. Within our system of bread it takes two bakers to make it work - this morning I saw evidence of two already here. So I waited and I pulled out my phone, and found the roster. I was supposed to be here, so what was the deal?
We shared a loose team hug and talked about what was going on, an administrative error and an assumption had created this situation. The end result led to me walking out the door with a sense of possibility about what I might do today. So after picking up a kilogram of peanut butter and a bulb of garlic, and drinking half an almond milk coffee, here I am.
I'm writing my thoughts, without any real objective. Just the feeling to express myself. There's no guarantee that this will make any sense, but we already covered that didn't we. This is my small gift of words, in a sea of objectives and deductions. When I get the day off I have the opportunity to let things flow naturally, it's such a relief to not coerce myself. Lists and responsibilities make a man strong and dull, like a piece of wood. Hard and dead and useful. I'm not suggesting you give up on managing things well, I am suggesting that a tree has more fun than the side of a house though.
We are life, and we are love. Funnily enough we thought it was us though, we thought it was our limited sense of self that was getting everything done. It became a responsibility and it became a burden, in fact both were just imagined.
Take a day like today to just be, and be immersed in the beauty that happens naturally without anyone organising it.
I look outside and I see a playful little fantail bird. They are fast and talkative, often changing direction as they fly around. If the points of their passage could be marked, I'm sure it would describe something profound. The first letter of god's name, or maybe the last. Perhaps it's simply beauty in essence, and to attempt to describe it is as silly as attempting to describe how sand feels when it runs through your hand. It just is, or it isn't. It's all happening as a gift for us, regardless of our busyness and self importance.
The indigenous here believe these birds to be the keepers of portals. Where it goes I don't know, I'm still grateful to go though. Experience is never static, you can never be stuck so don't panic. All of this beauty is happening in a wide open space, let's stick to the script though - wouldn't want to get lost in infinity.
My heart keeps breaking again and again, and I have nothing to do with it but pick up the pen. There's no guarantees in this life, and no warranties either. These elements hold together for as long as we need them to, and then they disperse again.
I pity the man who came up with insurance, what does it say about our doubt of life and our level of entitlement if we came up with that? I doubt it was a woman, they seem to have a more natural inclination towards life its self and not just the story about life that we tell ourselves.
I digress though, and no I'm not the slightest bit interested in opinions about gender. That's just another reason that the world is wrong and we are powerless. It's just another bullet point on the list of dissatisfaction. I'm not going to buy into that or sell out of it either, I'm just going to watch the game unfurl.
There's a thousand things I can't do as well as the next man, but this one thing I can take full responsibility for. I can make things so that inside myself I feel happy to be alive. It was a journey to get here, but I always knew I was meant for more than to just survive.
What were you made to do? What does your being yearn for, and do you really have a clue?
Gratitude
Spaciousness