Sunlight illuminates
my friends, the trees
their trunks, their limbs.
How lucky am I
to be able to turn
to see these gnarled trees
through this train window
stopped
waiting
for some unseen obstruction
ahead
Sunlight illuminates
my friends, the trees
their trunks, their limbs.
Orange-khaki-colored brush
crouches in front of them
Unashamed of their winter attire Take me as I am
they signal in their own
private language I have no need for adornments. I am here. That is enough.
There is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to guard us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures, recognize our innocence. — Charlotte Bronte
There is a kingdom of spirits that protects you. Do you not see them? –Charlotte Bronte
I wish I could see them—the spirits, the angels that surround us, waiting, longing to help us. I believe—with my mind—that there are such things; it’s consistent with the great saying God is Love which, I’m told, can be found in the gospel of John. I’m not a big follower of the bible, and I’m not a believer in the creeds of the world’s great religions. But I do believe in Divine Love—that It’s all around us, and available to us.
I can’t see the ‘angels’ that could easily be around me—around each of us—waiting to help us in our struggles, or perhaps wave some of that fairy dust off their wings onto our aching hearts—at least, most of the time I can’t see them. I’ll admit that sometimes I do have a sense of the Love around me. It’s just that it disappears so easily.
I already exist
Rather than make myself Be Someone
or Be Some Way
Just notice me-here.
I’m here!
No need to be someone else.
The Great Good already exists.
Rather than trying to manufacture It,
to prove Its existence to someone else,
or to convince It to Do Something.
Just notice It-Here.
Can you sit quietly and Notice It?
Can you capture a glimpse of It
now and then?
It’s Here!
No need to Make-It-Happen.
I’ve listened to this intunement today—more than once, as there’s so much.
Kevin says that there’s a vast body of information available to us. And it’s accessible! Something rises up in me, and it says, Yes, that’s true! Somehow, I am very, very sure there is a vast-universal-awareness-of-knowing, and that we can know it.
Then he adds, And it’s not me making it happen. A lot of energy rises in me when I hear this. He’s sharing this from his Whole Self—like a grass fire that spreads, and awakens in me a memory.
And there’s so much more—he noticed he can awaken that in someone else—and it wasn’t just him doing it! Hearing that, this comes: There’s this flame in me, it receives from beyond-me, and it speaks.
It’s beginning to sink in—that I can form a relationship—a WE—with something in me. I’d been sitting with certain troubling sensations and thoughts recently and had begun to understand this more deeply.
I woke up the other morning with an uncomfortably dry mouth and it came to me: I can sit-with this! I’d been wishing this dry throat situation away for years, and now saw that I’d been missing an opportunity to be-with-it.
What follows below is what I wrote while it was happening. Two short sentences came to me. I sat up and wrote them. And then kept writing.
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“I don’t look to you to disappear. I look to you to appear.”
I said/thought this to that place in me that is dry—thirsty to the point of having no more resources, completely dry and without what she desperately needs.
I wrote what came about the ‘we’ in August 2017, and I’d like to share it here:
Hello dear friends,
When I awoke last Tuesday–after having had a meaningful conversation about the “WE” with Kevin the day before–I found the following words wanting to be expressed, and I wrote them down. Now I wish to share them with you, knowing that what I’ve written is only a beginning, not all of it, and that it may change, it may disagree with itself later, it might give lots more that I didn’t know. And it might give it through someone else.
I welcome hearing what comes for each of us about this and about related topics on heartfelt connection. I am always seeking that with everyone–sometimes feeling I’ve failed, or worse: that I’ve forgotten about it completely. And sometimes the connection appears with a great sense of love and satisfaction.
Here’s what came for me to write last Tuesday morning:
In a ‘we,’ we are now able to take in so much more.
In ‘small self,’ we know very little. In ‘small self,’ we are aware mostly of our own personal concerns and barely aware of the concerns of others. Others are largely unknown. When we sense the presence of other, we still miss most of what they are, what they think, what they experience; instead, when we think we ‘see’ the other, we are often simply seeing what we think of them.
When we begin to notice and realize that the other has experiences, views, thoughts, separate from our own, and surprising to us, we begin to open up to knowing much more than previously.
When we begin to be aware of a “We,” we are opened up to knowing infinitely more.
That “We” can take the form of me-alone-by-myself-in-connection-to-my-spiritual-guidance. I am no longer the ‘small self,’ I am now ‘with’ an ‘other’ that lives beyond me, that doesn’t rely on my breath or my mind to exist. It is a living-something that is independent of me and which I can become aware of. Can we call it Body Wisdom? Spirit?
The”We” can also come about between me and another person. That kind of “We” takes form when I become aware of the presence and existence of another person as they become aware of me; in other words, where both I and the other person can sense that the ‘other’ has experiences/thoughts/senses that are different than my own and are valuable, precious, and worthy of my careful attention. And a further component: that in some way, we are both aware of that-which-is-beyond-us; maybe we call that Body Wisdom, maybe we have other terms to describe it. And the resulting conversation has a flow to it that doesn’t happen without this alive “We”.
