This Vast Embrace

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To know, and live, that you are both supremely sacred and absolutely human is the magnificent gift of being alive.

This seeming paradox, this knowing in the heart that you are sacred and so very loved…and knowing that you are completely fallable, vulnerable and human, is beautifully painful and vitally freeing.

Within our divinity there is infinite space for our infallibility, limitation and humanity. That which is holding us, holds us  with such tenderness and love, and in this vast embrace there is finally a place to feel, then let go of, shame, humiliation, fear and fighting.

As I write this to you, I am sitting in a profound peace. I just moved through the deepest feelings of shame. These are old, old feelings finding their way to freedom through very wet and profuse tears.

The love I had always longed for, I’ve found in this vast embrace. There is room here for my humanness.  The paradox is resolved. I am both human and divine. One holds the other with a spaciousness that is infinitely vast and utterly present.

Why write about something so personal? Because I am not just me. I am you. And, you are me. We wake up to these realizations when we share them with each other, when we see there is nothing really special about them at all, that things have always been this way.

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And you?

Please share with us your stories of this vast embrace, even when you feel nobody would want to know. We do.

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Holy Is All There Is

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Buttering the Sky

Slipping
On my shoes,
Boiling water,

Toasting bread,

Buttering the sky:
That should be enough contact
With God in one day
To make anyone
Crazy.

~Hafiz

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This morning, a foggy easy Sunday morning here in the city, Rachelle Mee-Chapman asked this question of her friends:

What feels like prayer to you today?

Such a rich and provocative question…

On Sundays…

While prayer is for each day and every day, today is Sunday.

On Sundays, dance is my usual form of prayer, the dance floor my church. There is no dance on Labor Day Sunday, though, as the big Sausalito art fair takes over the town.

So, today I write. The empty page is also my church, and writing another form of prayer.

Today, I sit in this warm and inviting cafe writing, and I consider her question.

Voices

I listen to voices sprinkling words through the air, trying to communicate as best they can what wants to be said.

I hear laughter.

I hear English and French.

I hear people who are hungry and thirsty, ordering nourishment for their bodies.

I hear people hungry and thirsty for more than food, perhaps communicating with each other to feed more than their bodies…to feed their souls.

Noticing

I’ve been noticing, just this week, how much I ‘think’ my life.

When I think my life, my body feels tight, constricted and stressed.

When I ‘think’ my life, I push and strive.

When I ‘think’ my life, it is just me by myself trying to carry the heavy load that I learned to carry. The load is indicative of something I have to do, somewhere I have to get, someone I have to be. It’s all some kind of illusion my mind keeps creating.

Life as Prayer

Rachelle’s question and Hafiz’s words bring me back to reality, the reality of Life simply unfolding…Life as Prayer.

I posted Rachelle’s question on my Facebook page, and Emily Silbert answered with this:

Today it was the mundane act of grocery shopping and stopping the automatic list-driven purchasing to get myself an orchid. i stopped and looked into it and it was holy, i was holy, the whole grocery store was holy.

Holy is right here, right now.

What if holy is all there is?

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Awake. Alive. Eternal.

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You can see eternity in a newborn’s eyes.

image by miss pupik

Look into these eyes.

Even in a picture, you can see eternity looking back at you.

These eyes are unobstructed by personality. That hasn’t been formed…yet.

Something alive is smiling back.

There’s no attempt to hide from being seen.

No trying to be more than what he is.

No fear that he is not enough.

Last week, I became a grandmother for the fourth time.

Each time is just as wondrous.

Each child a pure miracle.

Each one completely unique.

I’ve fallen in love with my new grandson.

[This is not him here, in this picture. His parents get to share him with the world.]

He is so sweet and so beautiful.

I wonder who he is and what he’ll love to do.

I was thinking about this, that once, a long time ago, this was me.

And you.

Unobstructed radiance.

No sense of not-enoughness.

This is what the sacred looks like when it hasn’t forgotten that it is sacred.

This is what the sacred looks like when there is no concept of ‘sacred’.

And, even when we do ‘forget’ and replace our awareness of life with our concepts of life,

the same eternal radiance is looking out our eyes, very much still aware of our true nature.

As I held my grandson for the first time, I knew I was in the presence of this radiance.

I could feel it.

I could see it.

I could sense it.

It wasn’t a perfect moment, and it wasn’t perfectly still or quiet at all.

He’s a newborn baby crying, farting, sleeping, and gurgling.

He’s alive.

That’s the point, if there is a point.

Look in your mirror and, without trying to see, see what is there. already there.

awake.

alive.

eternal.

The personality wants to think it is something other.

Notice, just notice, that you already know you aren’t something other.

You are the same as what is looking at you from these glorious newborn’s eyes.

Attribution image courtesy of Flickr: Some rights reserved by miss pupik

As a side note, no, this is not my grandson.  I don’t share my grandchildren’s images here on my blog. That’s for their parents to enjoy.

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I Begin Here

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It seems as though my last post, Listening Into Liberation, resonated with many of you. The comments you left were insightful posts unto themselves. They touched me deeply.

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“The future of humanity will be decided not by relations between nations, but by relations between men and women. ” D.H. Lawrence

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I realize that I know very little, if anything, about the answers to how liberation into wholeness can unfold. And at the same time, I absolutely know that wholeness is our inheritance, and that our true nature is already whole.

I know that consciousness is seeking to know itself, to awaken fully into wholeness.

I know that my rational mind can’t understand it, even if it thinks it can.

I know that I have a deep longing to heal into wholeness, and to be liberated from these ties and snares that keep me falling back into the false beliefs of our culture, that:

  • women are secondary to men,
  • the feminine is something to fear,
  • the masculine is bad
  • women have to apologize, constantly, for something not quite known
  • men must be taken care of
  • men and women can’t trust each other
  • women are inherently jealous of, and hostile to, each other
  • I, as a woman, will be more safe and secure in my relationships, and in the world at large, if I ‘pretend’ to be good, compliant, selfless, small…in short, something I am not.

These are just a few of the notions I (and others I know) have believed in the past, or continue to believe right now. Is there anything else you might want to throw in here?

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“…re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.” ~ Walt Whitman

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We’re told many things about women, about men, and about our worth, our value, how we should be with each other. We’ve been conditioned by parents, by our schooling, by the church, by the culture, by the media…

I can see the most necessary and important thing I can do to begin, is to question all of my beliefs. Period. Even my most treasured beliefs, the ones I cling to that give me a sense of righteousness, or a sense of safety and security. This is really about questioning the small, yet sometimes very loud and insistent, roommate in my head that wants me to believe these things so I will stay ‘in the tribe’.

I know liberation into wholeness will not come by hanging onto my beliefs. It will not come if I hang on to anything I have to believe in, because if I believe in something, it means I don’t really know the truth of it. If I did, I wouldn’t need the belief.

All of Life is Sacred

One thing I know is that all of life is sacred. I know this. I don’t have to believe it, because I experience it. I witness the sacred looking out your eyes. I hear the sacred in your voice. I feel the sacred in your touch. I taste the sacred in your kiss. Everything is alive with the sacred. Everything.

We are breathed, we are fed, we are loved, and we are held by the sacred. All is infused with the sacred. When we don’t see this sacredness, it’s because we believe the conditioning that tells us differently.

Patriarchal conditioning teaches us to fear matter, to fear that which is here right under our noses. Patriarchal conditioning is about fearing the feminine in us all, but most especially in women, because we embody the sacredness of the feminine life principle. Patriarchal conditioning tells us to transcend rather than embody. Yet, it is through the body that I experience, that I enter into relationship with you, with woman, with man, with life.

I know I begin here, with my own experience that all of life is sacred. Somehow it’s easy to see this sacredness in children. I see their innocence. Yet, this same innocence is alive in us all.

I begin with this innocence, this wonder and amazement that are naturally a part of being alive and aware. The only thing I can know, truly know, is what my experience shows me.

I long to know you, to listen to woman, to listen to man.

Wholeness is about Oneness, about no longer experiencing division within and division without. I have to begin here, where I am, seemingly still ensnared by beliefs, but willing to look to see what is here, what is true, what is so. And, then acting on that knowing, to move with truth, rather than shrink away from it.

The roommate believes it won’t be easy. Yet, the longing is much stronger than the roommate’s resistance.

And, you?

I’d love to be in conversation with you.

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