The following words were triggered October 30/06, through staying with Brian and Loraine and playing with their children, young Thomas and William.
Young, I was often driven by fear.
Dreams of black outline hells
annihilation, torture, abandonment,
a dark lattice of shapeless
gut twisting
lowgrade
terror.
Survival strategies of bravado and bluster
and angry striking
and withdrawal and hiding
conceit and deceit
and exaggeration
A prisoner with fantasies of being a hero,
trapped in the endless labyrinth
of isolation, and yearning,
and rootless distrust
and gales of feeling
and tsunamis of emotion,
– alternating storms and sunshine
blasting through the landscapes of my body.
One day, it seems, I accidentally discovered the power of embodiment
and ran and kicked and skated, and skied and exhilarated
and all the time faking and faking
hiding a rot in my core, an unworthiness, a bleakness
that occasionally burst out in moments of explosive madness.
And all the time something trying to understand,
to explain,
to rationalize the spinning web of the world
into something graspable
and . . . safe.
Remembering the standing waves in the rapids of this river,
the famous ones,
the ones that everyone who rafts this
wild untamed torrent always has to pass.
The hormones of puberty
girls, boys
and intimacy
and social norms
and military mindsets
and money and power
and responsibility
and needing to smash everything while
terrified to burn any bridges
And through all this …
Grace …
and Amazement …
Awe …
and Revelation.
God speaking through the church organ.
Blinding light refracting the universe
of an ice storm bringing the normal world to a halt.
Meadows, like grass oceans rolling out to eternity.
Crows talking on a wire
Smells of worms in the spring after rain.
Crabs and urchins and tiny darting fish in the rippling shadows of a barnacle encrusted wharf.
The smell of sea and the cry of soaring gulls.
It seems that much of my childhood was
a cataclysm of prolonged birth
Ambivalance
Why is it that some beings are pierced
by the conundrum of existence, from their very beginning
– while others seem to roll along in a blanket of
cushioning baby fat
as if, while journeying to the vestibule they pause for a rest
and somehow don’t resume their journey for thirty years or till the stirrings of death?
Twenty years old
and spying a raft, Namgyal, big enough to float me off the shoals of
family, culture, obligations, conventions
demands, compulsions, obsessions and on …
the list is vast,
Respite-care while the pain of the raw places settled
and I grappled with a framework
and thrilled with the possibility of mastering the world.
Ah
the conceit!
the arrogance!
The feeling of being a hero
Climbing out of samsara
Treading on the heads and shoulders of anyone who would serve the purpose.
Ah
the naivety!
the blessing of compassion which was deeply intertwined with longing for love.
Mad with confusion but endowed with the ability to feel, to be moved, to empathise even though mixed up with cocktails of conflicting aspirations.
And
the miraculous growing
the shaping of understanding
and capacity of is-ness
How can there be a more authentic demonstration of bodhicitta in action?
This unique unfolding quest.
A strengthening confidence.
A settling into the ground.
A life journeying of deepening richness.
The door opening to letting be in the innate juicy intimacy of
vast interbeingness.
A resting with less and less compulsion to do
and more and more richness of doing
– these words an attempt to glimpse the real journey,
a sense that to a degree they describe the journey of everyone.
To be born
to emerge
to stand upon the earth
to let go into the earthing, this groundless, indescribable
living mystery.
This measureless carpet of becoming that rolls out before us,
step by blessed step,
This braided river widening and widening in myriad dimensions
until
it knows itself to be
the sea.
Reflecting further on this schooling in living;
It could be useful to regard the central curriculum as
one of navigation and survival;
Tubes 101, tunnels 302, forests, deserts, canyons, mountains, oceans, and boundlessness.
Flowings, and pulsings, and snuggings and stretchings
Expanses, and volumes, and shrinkings and stasis,
networks and networkings …
We self organise and flower through each and all of these,
– sensible and metaphoric –
along with all the objects and happenings that one finds in each of these realms.
We concentrate on one main theme at a time,
sometimes for months or years on end,
exploring and surviving and then being thrown into the next.
Occasionally juggling three or four together
How do they fit?
How does it function?
And later,
pausing at a vista,
we recognise that we have been familiarizing ourselves with the instruments of
an autopoietic orchestra of creation.
this co-operative self-building universe of knowing.
And the music of musing births ephemeral modes of appreciation
the singing – a chorus of wonderment awakening.
And oh,
how many become becalmed in a back eddying – a particular landscape of
safety or paralysis
a descending amnesia
a forgetting of all
a fragmenting of energies,
broken concentration
reluctance to engage –
as if engagement were an option.
We’ve all been there
it’s part of the quest.
In summery then;
What is maturing? …
A deepening confidence of process.
A trusting in all.
A freedom to be joined,
to engage,
to surrender,
jazzing with the music of the moment,
nudging a program of beauty creating
that ultimately exceeds any need to describe itself in words.
Silence
Joy
Peace
Authentic presence
Dragons cavorting in the waves
Geese and Garudas painting universes with
the tracks they leave in the sky.