A collective that cannot share its sorrows
Cannot sit together in its grief and suffering
And see each one in the eyes of the other
A people so lost in individuation
It loses its humanity
Has not lost its mind
It has lost its heart
Forgotten itself
Fallen under a spell
The task of the restless one
Is to remember their own heart
Uncover it from all that has covered it
And then to shine it out
So others may also remember theirs
That is all we can really do
The rest is up to the divine.
We search for ways to express ourselves
But we are the creative expression itself
God paints us, sings us, moves us
How easy it is for us to take ownership
Of that which doesn’t really belong to us.
The heart longs
To sing it’s song
In the morning
And in the evening
Whether that song
Is of joy or sorrow
It is not the song that matters
But the expression
Into the universe
The mind says no
You’re not good enough
The song is lame
It’s too revealing
You are too sensitive
Too vulnerable
To be singing such things
You listen to the mind
But over time
The frustration is immense
The blocking of natural desire
To sing your unique song
Starts to kill you
Or make you depressed
You may have even forgotten
You had a song to sing
Because you are now distracted
By all the others things
That have gone wrong
As a consequence
Of forgetting to sing your song
But wait!
Friend, it is never too late
To sing your song
To give expression
To your uniqueness
And I’m not talking about
Mouthing from your ego
I’m talking about
Saying your blessed name
Into the eternal ocean
From your soul.
There is bad news
Despite all your efforts
Everything is still out of control
And you are falling through eternity
Without knowing how or why you are here
There is good news
It is all ok
It always was, always is and always will be
And the more you can accept
Your lack of control
The more you can bear the bad news
Surrender of personal ego
To the inevitable
Does not diminish one’s sovereignty
In fact it affirms it.
Presence is a portal
Through which we know eternity
There is only one hole in time’s tapestry
And that is NOW
We are born of time
Like all flesh and blood
Like all form
Yet still we can know eternity
When we come to a complete stop
And allow the mind to settle
As the sediment in a bottle settles
After shaking
To intimately know eternity
For one exquisite moment
Brings an ecstatic wave
And an un-reconcilable grief
That our time here is fleeting
And gone so quickly.
When acceptance is allowed
To fall deeper and deeper
From the mental realm
Into the emotional realm
And even into the physical realm
It starts to become an embodied experience
That shows up in all relationships
You only find out what it really means
In the act of doing it
As a theory it is useless
As a lived practice it is profound
It changes you and your world
But embracing acceptance is tough
We are conditioned into non acceptance
To resist life and fight with it
To over power it as though life were an enemy
That must be defeated
To fall into a deeper acceptance
All that conditioning must come undone
And that unravelling forces us to come
Face to face with ourselves
In increasingly intimate ways
We may not like what we find
But there is the practice right there
In accepting what we don’t like
In ourselves and in the world
Acceptance is an ongoing unfoldment
An invitation to go deeper and deeper
An exploration of who we are
Beyond and behind the mask.
My early years were filled with joy and excitement
Anticipation and the love of freedom
My teenage years were the destruction of all that I knew
The joy and excitement changed to foreboding and angst
My twenties were the playing out of denial of pain
Living in a chaos that allowed me to cope
My thirties saw the chronic repercussions
Of the previous decades
The impact of addiction
And relational dysfunction
My forties saw a ‘do or die’ situation,
A point at which I had to meet my demons
Or my demons would eat me alive
That’s when the door opened
My fifties saw the unravelling of my self
All the pain arose, the anger, the hurt and the fear
No stone was left unturned in the journey
That seemed to go on forever
My sixties are where you find me now, here, writing this
Wounded, weary, experienced, amazed, humble and aware
It all seems so strangely right
We are like trees
Everything grows us when we let it
Even the hurt and the pain and the angst
There is no answer that satisfies
So we must just allow the past
To be the fertilizer for the present
Peaceful loving acceptance
Of the whole journey
Is what I have arrived at
Not as an elevated destination
But as an ongoing relationship
That invites me to surrender
Again and again and again.
Some times I just sit back
And consider the infinite sadness of it all
And this very act allows me to consider
The infinite beauty of it all
Between these two wonders
Do I silently sit.
The human condition must be borne by each of us
Both our personal and ancestral tragedies and wounds
And the suffering of the collective
Somehow we have to expand our consciousness to do this
For the historic and habitual tendency we have adopted
To turn away from suffering, to ignore the horrors,
Does not, nor ever has, swept them under the carpet
Or made them disappear
All it ever did was create an enormous collective and individual shadow
That which is denied does not vanish
But lives in the darkness
There is great opportunity in these changing times
For everything to transform
And for humanity to begin living in an inclusive way
But only when each of us starts to transform our own lives
And begins living in an inclusive way
And that means we each must open up and face ourselves
And face the world
Bear the unbearable
Tear down the walls that we have erected around our hearts
Resolve our habitual desire to judge and measure ourselves and others
Purify our own shadow, meet our demons, welcome our suffering
And become clear vessels of the light
Not as superficial new age wishful thinkers
But as authentic, wild, humble, free, carriers of truth
Willing to bear the human condition
Even as our hearts break open
For we know that love pours forth into the world.
The world is increasingly divided
Don’t let that division become you
If peace and wholeness
Are your heart’s longing
You must put down all weapons that divide
Disarming ourselves is the hardest task
For it seems we are conditioned
To wage a small war on anything
That does not fit our own beliefs
And we each carry different beliefs
So there are small wars happening everywhere
To really embrace our truth as love
Those wars, those small yet insidious
Defend and attack wars
That keep the world stuck in division
Must come to an end
Therein lies the work of the warrior of the heart.
