40

luminous eastern rim -
palest cobalt and pearl

shimmering dancing waving
shapes
appearing, treeing:
palming, eucalypting, lillypillying
across dawn’s vast canvas

kookaburra cackling at the window:
tucker! tucker!
willy wagtail scolding:
greedy! greedy sod!
doves dancing their morning mantra:
“isthatso?” “isthatso?”

Life busies Itself
with the business of living Itself
without rhyme or reason, beginning or end

I, sitting, sees -
and I is It all
and It is I

source – the nth notes

39

funny how I always yearned to be able to trust Life,
to trust the Universe,
when the notion of ‘me’ was the only thing
repelling trust’s embrace

what a joke!

with the absence of a center-stage-self
(the concept that invents concepts of trust or no-trust)
there is only pervasive trust-ing

I knows that it is wholly lived
by Life -

that Life is its Holy Name

source – the nth notes

My Song

I am the song of the gilded dawn
gently heralding the day,
and the pristine azure sky, calling birds to flight….
Calling birds to take flight!

I am the smell of coffee happily
warming the morning,
and dappled streaks of sunshine across the breakfast table.

I sing as softly billowing clouds,
floating lightly overhead.
Roses are my melody and violets my refrain…
And violets my lilting refrain.

I croon as the sweet, pine-filled air that floats down from the ridge,
Cooling and soothing at eventide,

And starlight fills my lullabies…
STARLIGHT fills my lullabies,
as I slip into the soundless song of night.

~ Carol Travis

For any human being, the most significant light in their life is the light they give, not the light they receive.  And the act of seeing itself isn’t just an act of receiving what is coming from our world.  It is a giving act; it is a creative act.
We paint the world with our spirit, and our spirit is carried on the current of our seeing.  Have you ever noticed that?  … We can wake up in the morning and feel the wonders of the day and therefore see them.
~ David Karchere

source: Emissaries of Divine Light

35

joy knows no bounds
in the predawn hours

the earth is held in the embrace
of an otherness that can only
be called ’sacred’

it’s like a held breath,
a halt in time’s march …

then, the peach-hued sunrise
is noisily called forth
by the feathered guardians
of the dawn,
and the breath flows out

into the glory of Gaia’s first day

source – the nth notes

I’m reading Feather Fall – an anthology of writings by Laurens Van Der Post, and relishing his wordsmithing. Can’t you just see yapyap thinking-mind as this wayside mongrel? Barking, sniffing, tumbling, whining … any tactic that will serve to distract one from the sweet sensuous fullness of This Whateverness …

How little mere thinking helps a soul in trouble.  What a wayside mongrel it can be, running the length of the threatened kingdom of our being, barking at one master instinct after another, sniffing at the trees of our natural selves for the scent of a bitch it can tumble, or whining at the back door of our first warm-lit emotion.

~ Laurens Van Der Post, The Face Beside the Fire

Yes, it’s a paradox.  You’ve fallen into the wild knowing that the life you thought was ‘yours’, isn’t.  It isn’t yours any more than the rise and fall of your overlooked breath.  You are awake to your wild awakeness.  Well, occasionally.

And yet.

And yet the choices involved in being alive and healthy don’t go away.  It’s a lie to assert that they do, and a trap to believe that they should.  Every minute of every day choices are being made – in most cases, unconsciously.  Patterns of conditioning are playing themselves out, tirelessly.

Wild awakeness – effortless awaring – has a knack of bringing robot-mind into focus.  There’s a glimpse of the old reflexes groaning on.

And at that precise point a nanosecond window of opportunity opens – the story can change.

The ‘I’-stream, the lifestream, can flow in a fresh and unknown course.

‘I’-stream?  Lifestream?  This language is being invented as writer-mind moves into ineffable territory.  These terms imply something utterly non-personal.  And yet wholly You.

Life has no agenda other than its ongoing health, wellbeing and survival.  It knows the score in these matters.  And it knows when to withdraw its resources and start over.  That can be pretty tough love.

But for those of us in whom Life still has an investment, the toughest love turns out to be Self-love.  It scares us witless to ponder the ultimate unselfishness of Selfishness.

Yet Life has an awesome way of looking after itself once efforts to contain and control it are deconstructed.  Notions that life needs saving act to build a mega dam across its path – a dam that generates dis-ease and stagnation.

The paradox is only apparent: whatever you choose – whatever – is the movement of Life as it branches, eddies, streams, dances, disappears underground, springs forth, tumbles, flattens out in depression, rages, murmurs, merges, evaporates … while it pretends to be You.

1                    this unlit light, this Awareness in which the sense of ‘I’ arises, is eternal.  It is the core of you.  It is never born and never dies.  Best befriend it, for there’s no escape from it.  It’s your ‘I’, my ‘I’ – one, and only one, ‘I’.

2                    God is, like it or not.  However, names (including the God-name), ideas, opinions, descriptions or images of this ineffableness, are lies.  Remove the lies and what remains?  Your ‘I’, my ‘I’.  God is Light, the scriptures tell us.  Unlit Light.  See #1.

3                    Angels exist, as surely as do you.  The easy way to make their acquaintance is to stop believing the story about your aloneness, your separation.  The veil that separates one from the unseen energies which clamor to comfort, to heal, and to guide, is woven of thoughtstuff.  You don’t have to believe in angels, you simply suspend skepticism.  Stop the story.  Silence is like a gilt-edged invitation to your seamless support team.
(Angels taught me this.)

little did I know
that it would come
to THIS

that THIS
would be the shocking
truth -
the answer I had both
longed for and rejected

that THIS
would be as obliterating
as a terrorist’s bomb;
that the old life
would not survive

that THIS
would be the revelation
in naked, unskinned knowing
of the miracle
of every moment’s
breath:

only THIS
breath-breathing ‘I’

You are already awake.  And by you I don’t mean you as the imaginary separate individual.  I mean you as everything–you as this awake space that’s here right now, that is everything and no-thing.  I mean the seeing, breathing, awaring being that is already awake, already complete–always complete, always awake.  And everything is it, everything, everything!  The sunlight, the birds, the leaves, the traffic, the thoughts, the mental movies, the headaches, the episodes of acid indigestion.  Everything is this one undivided, awake, alive–what?  I could put some word on it–beingness, emptiness, presence, God, the Self, oneness, boundlessness.  Those are just words and each of those words is it.  Every word is it.  Everything is it.  And there’s no possibility of being separate from it or losing it or not having it yet, or not quite getting it, because there’s no one apart from it to get it or to lose it or to find it or to have it.  And the thought, “I’m not quite there yet,” is only a thought.  And that thought is it too, playfully expressing itself as that funny little thought and the melodrama that thought creates, because apparently whatever this is, this awake emptiness or whatever you want to call it, apparently it enjoys melodramas.  It loves playing.

~ Joan Tollifson

source – Joan’s website: http://www.joantollifson.com/writing5.html

Don Juan: One day I understood that my personal history was no longer needed. So I dropped it.

Radical Discontinuity of Personal History.
Jettisoned.
Gone.  Gone!

Please ponder this.

Extinction of story-self: trashing of memory files and folders; defrag of system; reformat.

No going back to the old grazing grounds. No replay of the old impulses. No safety-net of sangha, family, friends, colleagues. No suitcases, backpacks, backups.

Who am I without the suitcases crammed with crumpled versions of ‘me’?

I am lightened, that’s for sure; they weighed a ton.

I am lightened?

I am, goodness me, Light itself!

Light of being, knowing, feeling, flowing, unfolding.

Light unborn, unlit, and never not here, now, in this very THIS.