My first act…
The sound that arose as a grumbling in the belly
A womb grown too small
I emitted a soundless cry
“Let me out!”
A song to a rhythmic heartbeat heard
in surround sound
permeating my entirety.
My first cry of freedom
resounded in the open space: “I Am NowHere!”
For good or ill it seems to play out.
I die to return to the safe confines
of the womb of all creation
nestling in, and then
I break free of confinements again and again.
Poor Mother Father ever at their labors;
frictional hot sweaty ecstatics
of lovemaking
bear me upon waves of potentials
yet to come forth…
cries and sighs emerge in the throes
up from the nether regions hearts opened into — minds
quiet at rest in heart’s knowing awareness
and belly’s activities of Eros’s agape
with the irresistible Belovèd Soul Psyche.
And oh they suffer the consequences!
And birthings come forth
potentials actualize
and die returning again.
It matters not what words we put on it,
This remains unspeakably whole
while fire lights and warms the surroundings
with Love’s expressive wonders.
_____________ ♾ __________
What paints the canvas of our lives?
Who gardens this inner landscape of mind, heart and soul?
Under what sculpting influence is the body of our lives shaped?
Holy Fool abiding Here cannot find a “recovering creative” as the HeArtist known as Julia Cameron in her excellent book The Artist’s Way puts it. It’s a 12-step recovery program to help people realize that we are Love’s Art in action. To come through the artist’s process requires getting to the heart of the matter, all matters that concern us.
What Is the LightHeArtist’s Way?
How does This have Its creative Way with US, the unity self we are?
Each of us is the answer, each of us creatively finds our way.
What if creativity is transformative? What if the creative life impulse transmits energies that transmute? What if change requires struggle, stress, strife?
When I was young, like many teenage girls, someone gave me a diary and I started writing poetry. It was a safe place to find out and express my feelings and thoughts. In an age of the advent of singer/songwriters, poetry became lyrics, and music came to flow through. I remember going to a John Denver concert years later as he was talking about writing a song. He was standing there with his guitar hanging on him and with an arm gesture, moving across the air above his head, said “The song came to me.” That was my experience exactly. So nice and confirming to hear it from him.
Nowadays I write. It’s coming to me to write this. It’s emerging out of nowhere and includes my evolving inclusive whole holy experience getting to the heart of matters having to do with US: our creative dynamic unfolding; the survival of our species in this wild experiment on this incredible garden of a planet.
Gifted with sight through the creative LightHeArting center, there’s often stopping still to behold the creative activity of our true nature happening within and without. Right now, externally it seems a moment of midwinter stillness. All quiet, no fans are humming of the refrigerator or heater. The sounds of my plants growing is so very soft, seeming slow and almost imperceptible. Cat is napping and not snoring. Dog is outside not barking. There’s no wind, no people about, it’s bright and beautiful out with the sun shining reflecting upon the snow melting away. In moments like these I feel into the emerging out of nowhere everything everywhere NowHere. What could it be like to feel and sense so subtly even the walls emerging and returning? What has seemed so solid and real is not, it’s permeated with space, sound and light. Can I put my hand through it? Put what through what exactly?
It was after years of apprehending the Silence and Stillness of This LightHearted Being, the here/not here dual unity that This movement and activity showed Itself. Suddenly I became interested in it after all the time of basking in the glow of ceasing to be anyone doing anything, but simply being. I’m a bit slow on the uptake sometimes. 😆 As I read Christian Mystic Joel Goldsmith, the words the activity of Truth in your consciousness began to leap out of the page and grab my attention. Luckily I began with not knowing what that was. Most of my apprehension of Truth came from the outside in, or so it seemed. True Nature had been preparing my system for this next level of realizing. What I, in my Holy Fool Way call the FU-UNctioning (freedom unlimited—unleashed now) of our Essence was beginning. The profound contrast between Stillness and the creative expression of True Nature began to open — not in a way that I, in all my wisdom, could understand, but experientially. Today it is normal for my consciousness to focus in on the Changeless arising spontaneously as the Ever-changing in constant dynamic holographic unfolding and enfolding while the Stillness and Silence remain as is. It’s a development I didn’t even know was possible.
Like all prodigals, my focus had been on the return from the outer worlds of being and life to getting Home. Now Home was about to reveal Home Now Here fully alive and real. As this proceeded, at the last birthday celebration I had maybe five years ago, my invitation was Celebrating Being This Alive and Real. After years of exploration, inquiry, watching closely, studying the masters and mystics with a new eye of the Heart, the Divine scientific experiment of my life shifted radically. From opening into and releasing individuality unto the pure formless essence, a turnaround happened. It became other directional: the return of This transcendent to Here: immanence as This glory everywhere emerging, and finally to incarnation. This living mystery, including the creative discovery of Incarnation is still very much an HeArtwork in progress…until the last breath.
I’d like to report, and often do, the great fun, the play and fu-un of all This unfolding perfection. I used to feel that artists who do these great suffering agonies for their art were overdramatic. But what if the agony and ecstasy of being instrumental in the LightHeArting transformative process involves suffering? Who suffers? What is suffering, let alone suffering in allowing creation to happen in and through us, as it comes to us? The song came to me…
Paul McCartney put it in yet another silly love song. Shakespeare put it,
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrowCreeps in this petty pace from day to dayTo the last syllable of recorded time,And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe dusty way to death. Out, out brief candle!Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiotfull of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
This scene of Macbeth after hearing the cry and death of his wife shows perhaps the Author’s very human experience of futility; of wars and battles and struggles for dominance. As we journey with Macbeth, and who hasn’t, are we not touched? It harkens back to my father as he rushed down the hospital corridor to get to my mother hearing her cry out as she died. I believe he felt much the same as Macbeth, and he broke there, descended into a futility he never really arose from until he died, though he tried. He had no creative outlet. In his time, men didn’t ask for directions let alone help.
Doesn’t our HeArtwork offer our suffering recognition and in that, direction? There are horrors to face in this dualistic world of living hell realms, mired in depths of sorrow, pain and trauma. These are outer reflections of internal suffering — that’s untended.
What if This creative LightHeArting Life is a Great HeArtworking undertaking to be free in conscious unity? What if each of us is essential to This HeArt working Itself out?
What if the transformative evolving creative unfolding/enfolding hologram coming alive and real on our stage is perfect? What if it’s a huge relief to meet our suffering, and as Gangaji put it, when we know how to suffer it isn’t suffering? What if all the strategies we developed as children coping with a crazy and violent world to defend against the overwhelm — the trauma that wasn’t creatively let alone Essentially engaged with by anyone around us — simply no longer suffices to get us through? What if that’s perfect, indicating the structures of mind that need to come down? What if it is so painfully confining that they now require us to get with it, get withnessing our deeper deepest bottomless layers — what if this is the action required to Be the change?
For me, experiential Presencing with, inquiring, Being Still, and recognizing the dynamic creative life force energy actively engaging experience as is, is the Way that True Nature has been revealed to fu-unction when we unlearn how not to allow it. The phrase that underscores The Unschool for the Holy Fool is: unlearning how not to Be who we are in Truth. When we take our hands off matters, relax and allow, This is free to take care of us. Easy to say, not easy to non-do. This Is endlessly creative and totally wholly responsive to all itself in Love by virtue of there being no distance and no difference between the transcendent and immanent. This Is the nothing that is everything and can be anything, conditions permitting.
My funny LightHeArted Valentine to US is, as ever, a Re-birth-day invitation to discover for ourselves what it is to Be This LightHeArting Holy Fool fully Alive and wholly inclusively Real NowHere. We receive a long longed for illumination that uplifts us in recognition that This Is. We are plunged headlong into the depths of suffering, dying to ourselves and to all we thought we knew, had, were and were doing. We are rebooted after being shut off into unfamiliar unknown areas of creativity. And essentially creatively engaged with new life, feeling our way, we offer out HeArtworks of essential expression as orchestrating instruments of Being and vehicles of delivery: outlets. The creative flow of affluence returns. What goes around comes around. The creative Life of Hu*man: divine hearted creaturehood, is fullfiling potentials that already exist in the hereness of Here.
We start where we are and tell the truth in whatever way occurs. It may look like smudges of black ink rubbing out the white page. The creative self-transformative Life we are isn’t always pretty. It can look like HeArtwork I saw when I studied in Bregenz, Austria of artists’ paintings before WWII. There was a traveling show that came to town. Our art history professor who ran the program arranged for us to go. The artists of the inner LightHeArting Presence painted scenes of the Holocaust to come, as yet unformed, but potentials emerging in the minds of people like Hitler, out from within an inner agony that was foretelling and warning. We are repeating history because we haven’t unlearned enough from it.
Yes, I am given to delve in raptures of recognition we don’t have enough of, and share the glories of living LightHeArted Herein. Any valentine should offer that. I’m given to send out many. I spend many days in personal and interpersonal activities of This touching down where it hurts most. Spacious merciful untrammeled awarenesses is offered to let the natural healing mechanisms work LightHeArting. It’s a Life of creative discovery unfolding into fulfillments better than I could have imagined. We may even find ourselves smiling and laughing where before there was rage, hatred, terror and grief — auguries of horrors that untended could act out hurting our chances of real living; continuing to make us sick and crazy; killing us.
The dark HeArts are important as they break down, destroy our painful confinements, and bring to light what dispels the mesmeric hold the lie of separation has on us. Befriend the shadow. Our True Friend does — dies to undo the entrancing hold of hell. Our true nature, the never born helps immensely! Be the True Friend to those lost in shadowlands of suffering and pain untended. Right now, today, as you are, look out: Every soul is the True Friend. There’s no one else Here. Take a chance, consider what it might mean to Live that Truth no matter what. Leap into the unknown. Polish the radiance. That’s the activity of the Light of the Heart of Truth where the Real Companion meets Itself. It’s the Koinonos Yeshua and others have embodied and are actively embodying in the growing stronger glowing Heart of living Truth. It’s gonna break open our human hearts, they’re good, wonderful hearts but too confining, aren’t they? Yet they open into the true nature of Being LightHearted. Such the Holy Fool we are Being Hu*man. That’s Life, thank Goodness.
