Simple, But Not Always Easy

Words have not come easily lately.  Silence swallows ideas.  Only presence feels real.  Perhaps this presence communicates the love and care I feel for the people in my life, or perhaps some attempt to gather insights into words is needed.  I don’t really know, just as I don’t know if I can even capture in words the elusive essence of the simple joy of being.    It seems good to try to share.

I’ve always loved sharing thoughts and ideas with people.  I love the complexity, untangling perspectives in the midst of conversation.  It is more puzzling to share my wonder at the powerful impact of the Stillness that envelops me now.  It is more remarkable for what is missing than for what is there.  Peace is oddly indescribable and for that matter, uninteresting to write about.  It doesn’t need words, it just is.

I don’t think there is any way I could have imagined what it would be like if fear and anxiety left.  Like everyone I know, I assumed that struggle is absolutely necessary and even morally required.  How would anything ever improve if I didn’t fight with what is wrong? 

A radical shift in perspective made me think that the way things work is much simpler and much more mysterious.  Life is heart wrenchingly beautiful, just as it is.   Everything and everyone can be as they are and the creative movement that responds to life flows on a wave of love that I never would have believed possible.  Sadness didn’t leave, nor pain.  Everything flows and changes, sometimes easy, sometimes hard.  All the things I thought of as safe have proved illusory, all the things I thought I needed proved unnecessary, what I struggled to avoid has proved to be what I needed the most.  Nothing need be different than it is and yet everything still matters.   Instead of eliciting conflict, everything asks for absolute intimacy.

The future is riding this wave of what is and it is how we meet this moment that will create the next.  The “we” is not optional, we are not separate from each other and we cannot create alone, we are linked and move into the future inseparably as one.  I used to think that it was “just” an idea that we are “all one.”  I liked to think that if I worked hard enough and did it right, I could escape all the misery that afflicts my fellow beings.   Like so many others, I thought I could just figure it out and teach others how to do it. 

 

To actually feel this oneness is much more humbling.  Feeling my own pain, my own fear, my absolute vulnerability and feeling it echoed in every person around me brought an end to any illusion of control, to any idea of being great.   In fact, it brought an end to believing in any idea.  I know this sounds truly weird, but until you’ve experienced the end of your mind’s abilities, you can’t know that there is a way to know that is beyond mind.  You can’t know that this way of knowing is unimaginably trustworthy.

What is it that is so different?  The answer is so simple that it’s very hard to see and even harder to believe and there’s no way to know it except by living it.  There are two powerful points of awareness that occupy my attention now.  One is the simple awareness of my being, the fundamental aliveness pulsing through me and everything around me.  It is aliveness beyond the boundaries of my body; it is the fundamental sense of existing that I share with every living thing.  When I was totally occupied with my mind, I paid no attention to this primary sense of my aliveness.   The other point of awareness is the amazing stillness that all of life rests within.  Every thought, every sound is surrounded by silence, a palpable presence that grows stronger when I attend to it.

There has never been a moment in my life when this awareness wasn’t there.  I just didn’t understand its significance, its power or its beauty.  I’m positive it’s there for everyone, always.   It’s here now.   It reminds me of the ruby slippers in the Wizard of Oz.  Dorothy had the means to go home the whole time; she just didn’t know how it worked.  Obviously if you’ve spent your entire life thinking that you’ve got to get somewhere else to be happy and at peace, it’s a little hard to believe that paying attention to such simple things can make a difference.  But we are addicted to our minds and our minds, while being wonderful useful tools, can’t make us happy, cannot bring us peace or teach us how to love.  Our essence, the essential part of our being, connects with a deeper level of wisdom and knowing, a wisdom calling to be known.

Oddly enough, the craziness of our lives might just be calling a few more of us to tap our heels together and go home.