blessing the space between us

as we journey into mystery

the pilgrimage to our one heart

~

i’m breaking tradition today on this trifecta plus day of riches desiring to stay in the flow of the tibetan days of miracles and in the glow of the moon of our coming home to ourselves; so, welcome, welcome to day 30 of a season of peace on this twenty-eighth day of free at last february when we bless the space between us amplified by the flow and the glow and this is our day of celebrating the astonishing light of being on this beautiful day with, the energy of love and light with the sun shining on the energy of  tenderness, the crucible of our interconnectedness with the courage to say yes to creator, creation, creativity, the creative process…  with all the turbulence in the outer world, i’m so called by source and an almost five month old being to come into the dream cave, the grand canyon of stillness to be chanting thank you for all our relations who always see and be the sun shining to light the way…

thank you for walking home with me … this moonth also brings an especially touching poignancy to the space between us as this journey into mystery, this pilgrimage into the tiny space of our one heart, the void, the sacred space of emptiness is such a deep dive into the stillpoint of creation…

surrendering to the beloved and trusting in the tenemos of great mother to support and nourish us, we summon the courage to leap into the unknown and relax into the organic, rhythmic flow of the mysterious dance of life…

holding hands in the dark, feeling the waves of our one beating heart, we witness the birth of the new, the promise of every inbreath followed by the re-joy-sing of every outbreath… for in our coming together in the sacred space of our cosmic heart, we change everything, we are transformation dancing to the tune of el canto hondo, the deep soul song… stillness flowing, singing, re-joy-sing… be love, be loved…

 thousandfold thanks for being an astonishing light of being… seeing the best in others, spreading lovingkindness virally…

an auspicious day for the most special day of the great prayer festival, the first full moon in the tibetan new year, the day of miracles when Buddha performed one miracle after another blessing the cosmos with overflowing illumination… hundreds of years later, pilgrims, poets on a journey, still gather together to celebrate the cosmic flow of miracles…

for all our relations

living on a tiny blue dot

circling round a ball of fire

next to a moon that moves the sea

in a cosmos overflowing with miracles, blessed be!

on this day of celebrating miracles of illumination, let us open our eyes to the miracles of our ever expanding cosmos on both the macrocosmic and microcosmic levels seeing, being the great turning, the shift in consciousness from dominator to co-creator real=eye-sing it’s not the love of power but the power of love that sustains us. that flows through us… in this moment of eternity, may we all choose to be the power of love, to be the miraculous for all our relations…

by the time you read this, the moon will probably be full in virgo as i write this in the eleventh hour and it will be exact on the first moments of the 27th at 12:17 PST… as we are in the transition phase of the wheel of the year, what wisdom will you carry from winter/summer into spring/fall and what is ready to compost?

this virgo full moon in pisces, the being whole in ourselves moon calls us home to our collective heart, our one radiant heart accessed in the field beyond, the field of creative imagination where everything is possible and all is well in this field of grace, calls us home to ground our dreams to earth and embody the wise sage…

in this powerful threshold moment, saunter with me into this magical field, this field of transformation and bathe in the purifying light of sister moon… now, raise your arms above your head with palms curled toward the moon… we are sacred chalice drawing down full moon’s power to give, to receive, to nurture, to transform, to manifest our soul song…

now, drawing our hands onto our one heart, we are one with moon goddess tuned into her service, healing and magical energies… breathe in the dark smoke encircling the cosmos holding it in sacred chalice’s circle of light, breathe it out as pure white light… breathe in the fear of wild out of control forces, breathe out the empowered strength and grace to co-create a healthy world of harmony and radiance…

seeing the cosmos bathed in divine light, transformed into love’s pure delight, bring your arms home to the sides of your body with palms facing down toward the earth and send this radiant light of our the round full moon deep into earth’s watery womb…

listen… can you hear the new world breathing?…

let each breath you take bring you deeper into that center, into the quiet place, the timeless place, the spaceless space…

In Silence

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your

Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them
When all their silence
Is on fire?”

~ Thomas Merton ~

silence isn’t empty, it’s full of answers… everything is alive… everything is awakening… everything is moving…. everything is dancing… be still, silent… listen….

welcome, well come to day 26 of a season of peace on this twenty-fourth day of free at last february and the first of four days of the great prayer festival in tibetan buddhism where we celebrate the miracles of this new year; today with the support of Ram Dass, let’s meditate on pure mind…

“I have the intention to become free and I’m using everything in my life to do it. At first you just have practices like meditation or prayer. And then you go to work, or you do your stuff, or whatever. And after a while all of it becomes your practice, every bit of it. You tell me something that can’t be practiced. Tell me something that you can’t convert into becoming one with spirit.

So you keep working on yourself to cultivate the Witness, which becomes, in your way, a gift to everybody around you. Because they come in thinking they’re somebody, just like you do most of the time. And you’re creating an environment where they can if they want to, but they don’t have to.

So intention to awaken, finding the part of your mind that is not caught. Even though immediately after you’ve noticed it gets caught and then you come back again. The predicament is the clinging of mind. The predicament is that awareness clings to thought. I’ll just read you the first paragraph of “Extracting the Quintessence of Accomplishment.” And it comes from Dudjom Rinpoche who was an extraordinarily beautiful Tibetan Lama who passed on a few years ago I guess.

‘The nature of our mind. The nature of our mind is the nature of absolute reality.” Try to think of it now as the sky as opposed to the clouds. “Divested of all conditional and artificial characteristics fabricated by the intellect. This nature, this mind, is established with certainty in awareness. Awareness arises, naked, as the self-originated primordial wisdom. It just is. This awareness cannot be expressed in words, nor shown by examples. It is neither corrupted in samsara nor improved in nirvana. It is neither born nor ceases to be. It is neither liberated nor confused. It is neither existent nor nonexistent. It is neither delimited nor falling to either side. In brief, from the beginning, awareness has never existed as a substantial entity with elaborated characteristics. Its nature is primarily pure, void, vast, and all pervasive.’

“Now take the stages. You’re caught in experience. Then you cultivate the Witness, which is that little part of your mind that sees the rest of it. After a while the witness gets stronger and stronger and stronger until most of the time you are “Ah, so.” And even though the dramas of desires, fears, aging, life, crisis, are all coming and going, coming and going, they’re all undulating within you, there’s a part of you that is strong, that is clear, that is saying, “Ah, so.” And then, in this particular technique, you become aware of that in you which is saying, “Ah, so.”

And you go through, into pure mind. Which is neither the witness, nor not the witness. It is neither the experience, nor not the experience. It’s not looking, but it knows everything because it is everything. I am describing to you a very disciplined technique of using the mind to beat the mind. Stand back from experience into the witness, not denying the experience, this isn’t dissociation, this isn’t a defense mechanism. Stand back so that you’re feeling the pain of it all and at the same moment, seeing it. And when you’re resting in the awareness, the seeing of it broadly, then you start to note the seer. The witness.

And there’s a flick that occurs. And no longer are you experiencing the universe, the universe just is. It includes you but it’s nothing special. It’s really the process of dying as a separate entity into pure mind. And the moment you do that, a moment later you’re fully there as a separate entity but you’re also not there as a separate entity. It’s all there all at once. You’re a star and you’re also the heavens.”

~

welcome, weli come to day 25 of a season of peace on this twenty-third day of free at last february, may we all leap as one, letting go to flow with oceanic imagination into the field of rainbow mystery where only love is real and everything is possible… feel the great turning upon and within us supporting us to let go of fear and anchor in truth, wisdom and love as we swim in these mystical waters of pisces together…

for this special moment of eternity when we are aware of many losses including that of Lawrence Ferlinghetti at 101, let us beam our attention to facing our mortality and the opportunity we each get with such reflection to intend how we live… when Dr. Oliver Sacks learned he had only months remaining, he chose to live in the deepest, richest, most productive way he could real-eye-sing he is ocean. in his own words before he died:

~

“Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.“

~

such an interesting experience as hours later i read what i wrote and thought Oliver’s words were mine… and they are and maybe yours as well as we continue this seemingly never ending moment of sheltering in and wintering as a seed riotously germinating in the deep earth with the mycélium network of imaginal cells deepening in the experience of dissolving from somebody to nobody to everybody, from the ocean in a drop to a drop in the ocean to being the ocean… thank you for walking home along the pathless path with me…

welcome, welcome to day 24 of a season of peace on this twenty-second day of flowering field february which vibrates at 222, quintessential grace and it’s one more beautiful day of gathering the quintessence as ambassadors of love and light with the sun shining on the energy of  freedom in dreamy,watery pisces… even with all the turbulence in the outer world, today i’m so being sung in every cell the soul song of our graceful free and easy wanderer true nature which moves me to the familiar tale of hamsa or humso, the beautiful swan embodying grace while chanting so hum, i am that… light and love…

once upon a time, little swan was resting in a pool in dreamtime… she looked up and saw a swirling black hole, the biggest one ever… in that moment, dragonfly appeared in the sky and swan inquired about the black hole to which dragonfly told her it is the doorway to the great beyond and to enter you must ask permission and earn the right…

little swan wasn’t sure she wanted to enter the black hole so she asked dragonfly what’s necessary to cross the portal and dragonfly told her she must accept whatever comes just as it is presenced without editing one iota of great spirit’s design…

little swan looked down at her ugly duckling body and replied that she’d graciously accept great spirit’s design and would not resist the currents of the black hole… she affirmed she would surrender to divine flow trusting in the present moment… her answer pleased dragonfly who began to spin a spell of magic engulfing little swan in a whirlpool in the center of the pond…

when swan reappeared days later, she was transformed into a beautiful being of grace… dragonfly was shocked and wanted to know what had happened to which swan replied that she learned how to surrender to the power of great mystery, to soften into the grace of the rhythm of the universe…

may we all let go and undam flow opening into the great beyond’s pathless path of illumination and the infinite field of gracious synchronisiddhis…

so hum…

Happy 63nrd Birthday, Peace Symbol!

welcome, well come to day 23 of a season of peace on this twenty-first day of free at last february, the sixty-third birthday of the peace symbol and our day to celebrate the astonishing light of being one this beautiful day of gathering the quintessence as ambassadors of love and light with the sun shining on the energy of  freedom… on a somber note, it is the fifty-sixth anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination…

now, back to the peace sign…

 “Children of today easily identify it. They may not know its original meaning, but they know it stands for good things – be nice to friends, be kind to animals, no fighting. This is a marvelous achievement for Gerald Holtom’s simple design. Peoples around the world have marched with it, worn it, displayed it during combat, held it high on banners, and been arrested in its name. Ask any man, woman or child, ‘What one thing would everyone in the world want more than anything else?’ The answer would surely be world peace.’”

~ Ken Kolsbun, Peace: The Biography of a Symbol ~

on this day of walking into the unknown through a field of  impermanence, a day when peace is so called for, it is a beautiful synchrony that it’s the re-birthday of peace…

Gerald Holtom, an artist and conscientious objector, created the Peace Symbol on February 21,1958. According to Christopher Driver, author of The Disarmers: A Study in Protest, Holtom created the design and then brought it to an organizer of a local British peace group. After several revisions, it was unveiled publicly on Good Friday of that year, by anti-nuclear demonstrators — the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) — who marched 50 miles from London’s Trafalgar Square to the weapons factory at Aldermaston. It was the first Ban-the-Bomb March.

When Gerald Holtom sat down at his drawing board sixty-three years ago, he was in almost total despair. He later told the editor of Peace News: ‘I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle round it symbolizing Earth.”

Welcome “International Peace Symbol Day.”  May we hoist peace everywhere waving the remedy for despair…  Peace Out!

THE INNER IS FOUNDATION OF THE OUTER
THE STILL IS MASTER OF THE RESTLESS
THE SAGE TRAVELS ALL DAY
YET NEVER LEAVES HIS INNER TREASURE.

~Lao Tzu ~

welcome, welcome to day 22 of a season of peace, on this 20th day of free at last february so that we have a day pulsing at the frequency of 222, a day of grace, wisdom, clarity and a day also known as world social justice day – may it be so, may we roll up our sleeves, come home to our heart, set our eyes within and in thought, word and deed be in balance with all our relatives… and, it’s another beautiful day of gathering the quintessence as ambassadors of love and light who vaya con gaia en paz with the sun shining through the clouds on the liberating energy of  freedom…

as we come home to the heart setting our eyes within connecting with the inner treasure in the core of our being, may we feel the nourishment in this true refuge and express it by speaking and singing from the core of our being and bringing the wonder back…

and, as we saunter along the pathless path embracing the inner treasure, may we also re-member the old rabbinical tale of the angel of friendship which describes another trustworthy source of nourishment in this moment of sheltering… when 2 or more relatives gather in sacred space, another presence is generated – an angel (messenger) of friendship who sings the frequency of love into the celestial spheres uplifting all relatives…

in this moment, our one heart’s a tree providing belonging space for you, for me to sing our soul song of mystery conducted by the angel of amity… many voices, one frequency… multiversed universiddhi…  shanti, shanti, shantihi…

welcome to day 21 of a season of peace, a day i need to dive so deeply into the earth and sky and ocean of our creative cosmic being to be the peace and love we are in our core while in this moment of ebb tide re-membering birth is often messy and painful as we let go of what no longer serves to revolve/revolute into a more sustainable way…

on this day in 1942, the usa decided to arrest and imprison all citizens of Japanese ancestry – even as little as 1/16  percent and including orphaned infants – all of these beings were subject to mass incarceration with over 130,000 Japanese Americans – many full citizens and the children of citizens – forcibly relocated from their West Coast homes during the spring of 1942 and jailed for up to three years without a trial…

on this day of peace and re-membrance of the inhumane ways we act when fear leads us to reacting blindly, i must dig deep singing psalm 15 again and again…

who can be trusted with power,
and who may act in your place?
Those with a passion for justice,
who speak the truth from their hearts;
who have let go of selfish interests
and grown beyond their own lives;
who see the wretched as their family
and the poor as their flesh and blood.
They alone are impartial
and worthy of the people’s trust.
Their compassion lights up the whole earth,
and their kindness endures forever.

breathing in peace and compassion, join with me in being the world we all want… for me, it is a world of peace and harmony and wisdom and generosity built on justice and balance guided by love and compassion surrendered into great mystery,,,

~

as we come alive in this wild and precious moment

dreaming a new world on the way,

let us breathe in deeply our dreams coming full circle

as dancing stars give birth today…

dreaming a new world on the way,

we hear her whispering down under the sea

as dancing stars give birth today

creating sacred space for flowing beauty…

we hear her whispering down under the sea,

now is the moment for the dream to fully be

creating sacred space for flowing beauty

from our one heart soaring into rainbow mystery…

as we come alive in this wild moment,

let us breathe in deeply our dreams coming full circle

now is the moment for the dream to fully be

with our one heart soaring into rainbow mystery…

birthing a world where we live and let be, all of us singing in harmony…