Radically Different

I didn’t always understand how powerful it is to allow life to be as it is.  I grew up in a time where it was a civic responsibility to protest:  The Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and environmental recklessness.  But the duty to protest doesn’t stop there.  As life flows on and our bodies begin to collapse, our lovers fail to meet our needs, or our kids just aren’t grateful for all we did, we still protest.  When all our actions appear to change nothing in a fundamental way, when there is still war, hunger, injustice and environmental degradation, we protest even more.

Life offered me another way to see this.  It has not been easy to learn this and even harder to describe this shift.  My mind now rests in Silence much of the time.  The movement to act rises up out of the stillness and moves into my life, sometimes in emphatic response to something someone says, sometimes like a flower growing slowly out of the earth and very gradually blossoming.   From this place of stillness, I can look back through my life and see the voice of my deep Self guiding me.  When it showed up, the voice was always buried amid a million other voices, a cacophony of suggestions, longings or fear, pulling, pushing.   But from this clear place, I can look back and see the true voice and recognize the nudges that came from love calling me back to my true nature – they stand out with a different quality.  They always lead to deeper love and more effective actions.

I came to know that when that “feeling” came, I needed to follow it.  One time that stands out as particularly miraculous was feeling compelled to learn the art of sculpture.  I talked a local fire arts group into offering a figure sculpture class.  We had live models and a teacher from the local university.  Normally somewhat self conscious about my lack of art skills, I took to it immediately.  I practiced out of class constantly, forcing my husband to pose until he couldn’t stand it anymore.  What was so deeply satisfying to me was the quality of love that would arise from the quality of attention that I had to pay to a model in order to create a replica of their form.  In this moment of paying absolute attention to every detail of their shape, I fell in love with them.

Beauty is not dependent on outside attitudes or definitions, but on the quality of my attention.  I finally ran out of live models and had my husband take 10 photos of me from 10 different directions.  I used the photos to make a sculpture of myself.  The same feeling of love rose up and I felt a love and acceptance for my body that I’d never experienced before.  About a year later, I spontaneously lost 40 pounds and “resculptured” my body with love instead of judgment.  The joy came not from looking different, though that was nice, but from being released from the cruelty of my own judgment, not just about my appearance, but about my physical difficulties and the restrictions they entailed.

Everyone has this voice.  It may be near the surface or deeply buried.  In this time when the world is so desperately calling out for real change, it is imperative that we respond to the challenges facing us with a different level of love and wisdom than can be generated from our current level of mind.  In the deep Silence, oneness is no longer an idea, but a palpable, living reality.  Any action arising from this place of deep connection is taken from love and how it moves out into the world is radically different.  A radically different world demands us to be radically different.  Not easy, but it is our only hope.