 |
| Its Aboriginal name is Uluru. We know it as Ayers Rock. More than 600 million years old, this ancient sandstone monolith originally sat at the bottom of the sea. |
From Sunday's Brain Pickings, excerpted letters from Jack Kerouc, including this poem:
The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks dont see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you're already
in heaven now.
That's the story.
That's the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they're
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s'why I'll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.
More and more I tend to believe that much of what surrounds us is illusion, into which we may or may not buy as suits us. We have wisdom, I believe, within each of us that can bypass the illusions, lift us out of the past's repressive bonds and our mind's whispered fear about the future. Which is how we end up making pancakes in our shacks or cooing at the moon, teaching ourselves to do things we thought we couldn't and protecting ourselves from noises that would lure us off course. This is a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other business as I experience it, truly a next-indicated-thing assignment bursting with lessons about kindness, beauty, gratitude, forgiveness, going slowly, giving up counting, choosing (as often as possible) the high road, resisting engagement in squabbles, surrendering a need to be right, valuing sound sleep above many other things.
What I have learned since I began blogging (still a word that lacks music and any speck of loveliness but it is what we have) might be described as finding, through trial, error, intuition and enormous grace, a way to become an island in the moment, no longer so firmly attached to what did happen or what might. The blog and I are works in progress, or process, not fully formed as what we may yet be, not as we were, complete for now, with an asterisk (*) that means aspirations. The best description I can give you right now is this: you wake up and have an intense desire to go fishing. You do not, as a rule, fish, but you acquire the necessary gear and find a spot at the end of a pier or the edge of a lake and never think again for an instant about fish or catching them, cooking them or what in the world you are doing there. The universe, as I understand it, needed for you to sit and stare at a body of water until the sun went down and sent you the message it knew would get you to where you were needed. And so I blog.
Deepest thanks to all who have ever read a single sentence here, who have come back, left comments, shared the link, left this space renewed in any way and been silent, solid observers, witnesses, of whatever occurs.
8 comments:
Yes blogging is a mysterious process, one that once you're in it won't let you go....until it does....and i applaud you for keeping at it so assiduously!
Charlotte - Thank you. When we give ourselves up to reaching where we are supposed to be by whatever means, well, things change. xo
Dear Marylinn - as a child encouraged to fish (fish as food, to eat) I struggled and resisted, insisting I would prefer either not to fish or otherwise to stand quietly on the sea's edge holding a fishing rod whose line had no hook attached. You have so perfectly described the experience here when you write of the universe - as you understand it - requiring you/us to sit and stare at a body of water until the sun goes down, sending the message it knows will get to us, and get us to wherever it is we are needed. . .
Your blog is a sanctuary and, too, a place of instruction, inspiration and healing. I am grateful. Thank you for all you give shape to here and Happy 6th blog anniversary, dear friend.
Much love xo
I'm reading Adyaashanti's book, The End of Your World. He reminds us of the dream state and waking up from the dream state, moments of freedom or enlightenment. Emptiness. No self. When all falls away.
Our writings are little connections in the great grid of consciousness, enough to know we aren't ever really alone...
XX Beth
Claire - Thank you. I am grateful for, among other things, the blog as an opportunity to write, as the means of connecting with those I now know as members of my tribe, as the vehicle that continues to carry me beyond my imagined or self-imposed boundaries, as the doorway to a unique magic. Thank you for being here, for being. Much love. Cake will be served later. xo
Beth - Thank you. Our writings are the stitches we add to the vast quilt and the breadcrumbs we leave for ourselves, others we hope, to find the way home. Eternal students, what a wonder. Love to you, xoxo
And if "blog" is a lumpy word,then "Bloggiversary" surely is it's ugly step mother.
The older I get, the less real everything seems, and the less I care. Maybe when I'm 80 I will shimmer, barely there...
Denise - Lumpy, leaden. I suspect those with the ability to see notice that you already shimmer, present for what matters, waving away the rest. The great mystery deepens. xo
Post a Comment