My beloved’s suicide plus 18 months.
The word is not the thing, and all I can give you is words.
Seemingly never-ending new depths in the ocean of surrender. Â
Familiar after familiar revealed as ephemeral. Â
Perhaps it’s a feeling one has as death of the body approaches. Only for me it isn’t physical death that’s at hand (or so I think). Â
It’s the delusionary nature of worldly existence. The schoolhouse quality of all human considerations. Their purpose only to awaken us to ourselves as a manifestation of All That Is, one of God’s many monikers.
Every speck of me, every unit of life force, is a flame of Divine Light dancing with all the other specks in the universe that are being continually re-formed into some equally evanescent person, place or thing. Â
Even my understanding of my guru of 40 years (in this incarnation) is so insignificant compared to the reality of Oneness I seek, and that he guides me to.Â
Firesign Theater had a slogan: “Everything you know is wrong.” I’m not sure what wrong means, but incomplete is the label on every thought I’ve ever had.
I wonder if the so-called dark night of the soul is a visceral confrontation with that truth. Not a confrontation that happens once, but happens repeatedly as we shed more and more our attachment to any definition of reality, since You Know Who is beyond all definition.Â
I am both unsettled by my falling apart and grateful that accompanying its pain is the awareness that all deaths are a lesson in the continual letting go that is the path of ultimate awakening.
Still, I’m not above daydreaming of doing absolutely nothing but sitting with a cup of tea and staring out my window––for maybe a year, or ten.Â
Among the backyard delights to contemplate is the Buddha on the compost bin: two expressions of turning what dies into nourishment.
Thank you Steve, always a pleasure to dive into your sharing heart.
The image reminds me of a moment just before I was kicked out of graduate school. I was inspired by an artist, sculpting beautiful endangered animals using blown tire scraps from the highway, to do something similar. I spent a day or so gathering tires from the roadside into my jeep and found a remote spot on campus where I built a 10 foot buddha made of tires. I left the sculpture there and returned the next day to the sculpture to find it bathed in white as it had snowed that night. It had transformed from a large black figure to a fully white one. I found it a profound reminder of the duality I was swathed in at the time; right and wrong, good and bad. As a spiritual artist, and upon reflection, I found the cosmic transformation to be a full on reflection of my state of being at the time, and both prophetic, and telling: I was driving to get thrown out of that school. It was a foreshadowing of another kind of death for me.
Thank you for sparking the memory.
So beautiful. Thanks for sharing.
An absolutely confirming piece of writing. Steve, I am so thankful for you. Your sharing of your own inner work and processing informs and assists my own. This piece so beautifully simplifies a most complicated series of steps into something I can make sense of. . . it is a little bit of a helping hand over a brook so to speak. Thank you. Much love coming your way.