Word of the Week - 160

“Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.”    - Ram Dass

Word(s) of the Week:  SPIRIT ENCOUNTERS

Art by Lisbeth Zwerger.

Ram Dass also said, "Treat everyone you meet like God in drag."

I have come to believe that all encounters, human and otherwise, are spirit encounters.  Human to human, it is far too easy to slip into expectations, anticipating certain outcomes, making no allowance for the fact of spirits meeting - or colliding - and instead simply reacting.

Beneath the exterior, applied selves we may fashion to carry our often vastly different spirits from place to place are the grottoes, the hidey-holes where we truly live.  Spaces secret and safe where there is no reason to be other than who we are.  However deeply hidden, we are always at home within.  It feels wildly essential to me that I try and remember this, remember that we and our exchanges occupy sacred ground, the conversations beneath, behind the spoken words.

I wonder after a night of vivid dreaming in which all visitors feel so present, whether others share that experience.  There have been far too many of these dreams for me not to believe they, too, are spirit encounters.  People long departed or perhaps merely distant arrive and I awake knowing we have spent those dreaming moments, during which much is always revealed, together.  There is a sense of needing to send spirit emissaries to communicate without disguise or armor, that this is the only realm in which such honesty can occur.  That I am capable of imagining these dreams are more than dreams I freely acknowledge, yet I know myself to be capable of recognizing the existence of unlikely events, of trusting what cannot be verified.

In spite of loss, pain, terror and occasional defeat, life is the on-going seance during which we become familiar with magic.  As I've been typing, Hummingbird has visited my window twice, checking to see that amnesia hadn't overtaken me, confirming that I continue as a student of its message of joy, lightness and love shared.