Jumping off a cliff and back into LJ
Oh dear ones, I’ve been gone from here for many months and I’ve missed you all. I know it sounds strange, but I often think of you and feel a deep sense of community and camaraderie in our collective motion to dive into our hearts to find words to express the wonder of the universe. There must be a vulnerability and openness to go that deep, and I so appreciate each of your journeys.
It’s been an amazing time of growing and opening and most of all, letting go. Letting go of things that don’t serve me well like self-criticism, fear of conflict and chaos, questioning my self-worth, and so many unnecessary limited ways of thinking. It’s extraordinary to find that without those limiting thoughts, Being shines forth in all its beauty.
I know you all understand the difficulty of describing this, especially here in this community of great souls who use words to express the deepest murmurings of our hearts. Here more than anywhere our ears open and we nod with understanding when we say, oh, it’s almost impossible to express our truth into words. We know their very limitations as well as their beauty. They can shimmer like mirrors reflecting the sun and yet deep down we know they lack the very essence of meaning that lights up the truth behind them.
Take love. How on earth do we describe love? When we see the word love, our hearts resonate in knowingness, but then the mind wants to step in and turn it over and over in objective parsing. What kind of love, who does it involve, is it there/ is it not there, it’s missing, it’s suffocating, it’s not enough, it’s too much. And yet, when we sit with love in meditation, in prayer, in reflection, in the very moment of gazing in our beloveds’ eyes, what is love then? Ah, we smile then. We smile because we know the mind is too small to know love’s vastness.
But the mind is wily and wants to know. So we often defer to the fear that it spins out. The fear of not knowing it all, the fear that the mind cannot contain this. So what then? Where is love when the fear creeps in? We can choose to push fear away, to avoid it, to pretend it’s not there. Or we can sit with it and see what it is. Take it in, be with it, allow it, and then kiss it tenderly. Yes, kiss all our shadows where fear lingers even if the fear is overwhelming. Take it in, take it in, take it in until we think we are going to explode from the terror. In this very motion of allowing this great fear is the doorway to our selves. To the power and limitlessness of our true selves. And if we go into it and through it, where does it bring us? Into the arms of exquisite tenderness and love and compassion for ourselves, for others, for the universe. And a stepping outside of separateness, stepping into living directly as the universe moves and supports us. Here. Now.
This is what I’m discovering. This living in the unknown that continually throws me wildly (if I resist) and gently (when I trust) into a place of not knowing. And when I totally allow the trust to bloom, it feels like jumping off a cliff backwards. Without the fear. With my legs and arms wide open. And not a foothold to be found because not a one is needed. Saying yes to the exquisite beauty of life, saying yes to our frailties, our moments of human stupidity, our compassion, our gruffness, our vulnerability, our shame, our great love, our stillness, our wisdom, our truth. This is life. This is what I want to share with you, with all the world, for it is our true birthright.