I’ll Save Your Place

The doors and windows are open wide and welcome

The wind as it blows through my house and my soul.

It brings a beingness of light and truth, peace and love, disguised as wind.

Trees sway in its beauty,

Souls sing in harmony with its truth and

The unconscious void is filled with its one love.

I know that the empty void from my past existed only in my mind.

My mind was deluded and swayed by the ways of the world but now,

I am neither of the world nor in the world as

The world is in me and you and you and you…

There is no separateness in our beings but great diversity in our humanness,

As it should be, as it was meant to be. The contrast is beautiful.

“Between the silence of the mountains and the crashing of the sea, there lives a land I once lived in and he’s waiting there for me” Moody Blues

So… will you meet me there, in the silence of the mountains, in the void of fullness, in a world of our own making

Where the wind blows its truth into our souls

And surrounds our hearts with love?

If I get there first, I’ll save your place.

Will you do the same for me?

A Robin Sings at Dawn

 

A robin sings at dawn and

The day breaks on a new world.

 

A world different from the one

The sun set on yesterday.

 

It is the same earth but

A new world.

 

My world is not the same as yours and

Your world can never be the same as mine as I am not you.

 

Our eyes work in the same way, yet

See everything differently.

 

A million souls have been lost since yesterday, but

A million more were born.

 

We are not alone or the same…

 

Watch the progression of the wind through the trees.

Notice how each tree moves to its own song and in its own world.

 

As do we…

 

Do you feel the same breeze that moves the trees?

Do you know and hear their songs?

 

They hear mine…

 

Today, even my heart is different than yesterday’s,

Is yours?

 

In the night my dreams change me and

I wake up in a new world.

 

It happens every morning,

But it’s never the same.

 

The world’s consistency is but an illusion.

 

The ferns leaning against my porch screens are a little taller than they were before.

 

Overnight, more geranium buds have opened and

The garden has drunk up all the water I gave to it yesterday.

 

Everything has changed

Yet appears the same.

The illusion is well practiced and convincing,

 

Or is it?

 

After all, the Robin never fails to sing at dawn.

 

 

Rain

The sound of rain takes me to a place of inner peace as it

Falls in sheets, slides down the roof and over its edge in a curtain of water.

Tree leaves dance with the weight of the rain and

Flowers wash their faces in its freshness.

The sky is lower on rainy days and

Holds me close to the ground.

Forest sounds are muted and muffled and

Light is  defused into grayness.

It is not a sad and depressing grayness,

But a soothing and peaceful shade,

Full of the necessity of remembered sorrows and joys.

I love a  rainy day that is soft and dark.  It begs me to stop, rest, and be mindful of my surroundings and loves.

It reminds me to take the time to be lulled by the patter of rain on the windows

Into a place of inner stillness,

And there remain, content to just be and

Accept what is.

Quiet Gentleness

There is a smoothness to the

Texture of ordinary days.

Ease and effort are the same,

Quiet gentleness and holy light.

Each object flowing effortlessly

Into every other object yet each

Remaining what they are .

“Water takes the shape of the vessel that contains it,

Yet has no shape of its own” (Mooji)

What is my place in this quiet?

I am the water outside of the vessel,

The space the wind occupies between the trees,

The pause between the breaths.

I observe the smoothness of ordinary days,

feel the light that exists at the center of the flower,

And know that he and I have become one.

A Play of Stillness (2/24/17)

I sit on the stage.

Darkness surrounds me.

The audience, if there is one,

Is silent.

There are no props on the stage

Only layers of black curtains.

Although I don’t remember auditioning for a play,

Here I am.

It’s odd that there is no music or

Other players.

So I sit in my darkness for what seems like forever

But there is still no sound, no movement, no life.

Just stillness and a mild sense of confusion.

I feel the space in front of me more than see it.

I sense it is there, curtains in a circular shape

A boundary perhaps but between what and where?

The other side is unknown and unknowable

Until the show begins.

But will it begin?  Still there is no script or other players,

No music or lights.

I run my hand through my hair to prove to myself that

I am still real in this sensory deprived place.

But what is real about an empty stage, a wordless play,

A playerless story?

I begin to realize that

None of those things matter.

All is stillness and non-duality.

The “show” never begins and never ends.

The circular curtain and empty stage contain eternity

And this space is an empty place within me.

There will be no play, no script,

No lights, no audience.

This story is mine, the darkness my stillness,

The only witness, me.

Just me as part of the universal consciousness

Acting out a play of well-rehearsed lines without ever saying a word.

Each player a part of the whole

Never separate from the others.

All joined in the cosmic drama

Of existence.

The curtain rises on one story, one actor, one consciousness

In an act that never ends.

It Waits

It waits with patience hands

Outside our knowing, waiting to be let in.

Its story is always the same,

Its truth dependable but not always what we want to hear.

There is no hypocrisy, no deceit in its soul.

It is the soul that fills the void, that encompasses the eternal.

It exists in rhythms of time, tides of dependability,

Cycles of freedom and seasons of hope.

It can be ignored, but never escaped and so it waits,

In beauty and joy, in bliss and acceptance, in love and peace,

For us to wake up and realize it is but a mirror of ourselves,

The face of our existence, the light in our souls,

The essence of our being

Before we were born.

November Silence

 

 

The color outside my bedroom window is gone.

Yet evergreens stay to remind me of life’s continuance, always existing just below the surface.

The trees are stark silhouettes of gray,

Each branch and twig evident and asleep.

There is a new silence in the wood.

It is a soft, comforting, sleeping silence.

A hush of reverence,

A soothing of soul.

Awareness hangs liked smoke among

The naked branches.

It is an awareness of belonging, of no doubts,

Of confidence in the being and faith in the belonging.

And so they stand, the trees, in winter’s silence,

In perfect harmony with their place and mine.

Each a witness to the other and

Both a witness to the One.

It Waits

It waits with patience hands

Outside our knowing, waiting to be let in.

Its story is always the same,

Its truth dependable but not always what we want to hear.

There is no hypocrisy, no deceit in its soul.

It is the soul that fills the void, that encompasses the eternal.

It exists in rhythms of time, tides of dependability,

Cycles of freedom and seasons of hope.

It can be ignored, but never escaped and so it waits,

In beauty and joy, in bliss and acceptance, in love and peace,

For us to wake up and realize it is but a mirror of ourselves,

The face of our existence, the light in our souls,

The essence of our being

Before we were born.

Wind

Stunted trees

Bend and cower from the wind.

Its Winter howling is incessant.

Its cold all pervasive.

The mountain side Bearberry brambles

Grip tightly to the glacier scarred rocks for safety as the wind

Flows in rivers of the sky

From the White Mountains to the sea.

It feels its way with outstretched arms

Solid and real, over a

Path that is well worn and familiar into the valleys

And river beds along the way.

The power of the wind pushes the sound of thunder ahead of it

And Carries the storm clouds on its back.

It washes over the landscape

In partnership with the trees.

It is a force that can move them to dance,

Shake them to their roots, and love them with its allover touch.

Mountains and trees diminish the wind.

They sap its strength with their reluctance to let it go.

They want to hold on, to experience its freedom and lightness

They yearn for a chance to throw off their earthly chains and soar above the land.

But in the end, at the last, the sea is the master leaving

The wind no choice but to rush into its out-stretched arms, to be consumed by the waves,

To become one with the spray, white with its foam,

And in the crashing of the wind powered waves on the shore,

Release its energy back into the realm from which it came,

Completely the cycle once again.