Monthly Archives: May 2017

The Reverent Ridiculous

Take this moment of a morning, make me one with it. 

Beyond what is and was and the weight of impressions of what must be, let the barking dog of this cluttered mind roll over to have its belly scratched by the infinite.

Empty me of “must” and “because”. Leave only “this” and the diamond-edged softness of flow’s purity. 

Where there is a rubbish bin overflowing in my psyche, open the paths to find new ways where waste is fuel. Where the inorganic a machinations of the mechanistic weigh heavy, let me find that canoe carved from the ancient trees of the man-made mind.

And bring with all the humour…the ridiculousness of statements like “diamond-edged softness of flow’s purity”! Keep strong the hilarity in all this chaos, the ribald in the reverent. 

For where the sacred becomes profane, and the serious work shifts to blissful play, there in the moment between the two is the line I yearn to paddle, the wave I’m meant to catch, where water and board and body are only now. 

And as this world stirs awake, so opens my soul to the new and the ways that were, relishing the challenge to be empty and let love pour through.

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Into The Wonder

Let us drop into the majesty of it all…

That deeper wonder that suddenly shifts into crystal clarity as soon as I, and I’m guessing you too, takes a step back in perception. To put it another way, when we move from taking in the world rationally and instead give ourselves a moment of wholeness, where we can step back and see how countless moments of chance and awe have layered themselves upon each other, different cells each with their own unique function in the forming of the tissue of our lives.

That I get to watch my children tearing about the fields with exquisite joy and urgency, totally assured in this moment that only this nettle must get bashed with a stick, in the next, that only this book will be suitable as a story for this moment.

Or that I can drink in the smells and hear the taste of the flowers as they riot into life along the coastal path, blooming with such beauty and such ferocity that my own joy and wonder, ineffable though it is, seems almost arid in comparison.

So what of these words we are sharing? What purpose, what weight and import?

But maybe that’s just it…the weight and the import can drag us down. What about vitality, about roots that wend their ancient way into the dark and supple earth…and the dandelion fluff that lights dancingly upon them?

Now the tears wish to come…both of joy – for to be present, to see, feel, taste, to relate, how can there be words and not awestruck tears to adorn their mighty grace? – and of sadness, that only here, upon this anonymous page can I lay out the certainty of my heart that there is so much more than randomness and mutation.

It is the most terrifying thing to be as open as this. To risk the fall, in every moment of adversity, into the heart closed distrust and disillusionment that can be total in a moment and be years in recovering.

I cannot walk your path, but I can say you are a wonder. You are the synergy of the infinite unfolding. So loved and so lovable.

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Labels and the Journey Of Building

When was the last time you considered you might be wrong?
I mean on the deepest level.

What if everything you thought you knew began to crumble, leaving behind something vital, thrilling, but as yet totally unformed? Like an egg that begins to com and tremble from within, a few cracks start appearing on the surface of shell and your pulse quickens because you’ve no idea what is about to come into life.

This is where I find myself, still coming to terms both with what is happening and with the fact that this blog has made it abundantly clear that this is the time to begin sharing what is unfolding.

A part of me is dropping away. The head part. The mind, the thinking, the fear. Those familiar with the archetypes first explored by Jung and then built upon by Moore and Gillette would recognise that for much of my life my Magician has been the dominant guiding force.
With good reason. The Magician is responsible for managing fear, so while a person has much to fear, the Magician will take a significant role.

But decisions made from fear can only take me so far along the path. Soon there will come a dark cave, or a forest entangled with thorns. And the head will not be able to guide my steps a long the path that must be taken.
In the face of such obstacles a deeper knowing is needed, a knowing transcending the measured logic of the Magician mind.

It is a time for sovereignty, for living from the heart and allowing myself to be a conduit for the force that from the acorn brings the oak.

So it is that the person who bound his ego identity up in the writing of a book about making a living doing what you love, finds himself less than 48hrs from the start of a 9-5. And I am thrilled by the prospect.

The crack in the shell came three or four months ago. A woman called Stefanie somehow found me online and asked if we could chat about what she hoped to achieve in her life. As a keen poet she had been inspired by coming across my wRAP-Ups of conferences and events.

As we spoke, a sense in me arose of how the idea of connection was intimately bound up with everything Stefanie was speaking about, including the taking on of a new job that she was shortly to begin.

I ended the call knowing that the gold in what was shared for me was the crystal clarity that the journey of making a difference and a living doing what you love is a life-long quest…which may include essential  moments (which could be as long as months or years) of being employed, where a job is not being “Just Over Broke”, but is instead a “Journey Of Building”

So when the opportunity presented itself to be employed to design and deliver education and enterprise programmes for one of the most innovative companies in Europe…it became clear that the only part of me that was hesitant to make this possibility a reality was the part of me that had gone to great lengths to build the pedestal upon which I’d placed the labels I thought the world would approve of – Author, Speaker, Entrepreneur.

This same part of me had bound up my identity with concepts like “failure” and “incapable” if somehow, at 35 I was still needing to learn certain lessons and develop certain capacities so that I could make for myself the seven figures the face books ads tell me I should be aspiring to.

I saw clearly how much this was magician’s work – for the magician keeps us safe by devising strategies based upon mitigating our fears.
As such, it needs labels around which to structure its strategies.

But if I let go of those labels, trusting that whatever caused the Big to Bang knows my deepest, most beautiful desires and has mapped a path to them far more wondrous that I could ever conceive of, then I shift into a way of being where concepts like “job” and “expectations” and even “should”, become only a series of letters collected in a certain order.

They have only as much power and magic over the course of path as I am willing to endow them with. And I can assure that the soft and certain joy I have felt ever since letting go of the person I thought I had to be is so profound that I can think of nothing that would compel me back to that way of being where I believed I had to have the answers.

How joyous not to need to know how it all has to happen. Instead feeling deeply into my heart, listening only for what needs to be done right now, and doing it. Nothing more.

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The Half Torn Plaster

Dear Love,

I come to it late today. Feeling the heaviness of a day well spent, and the echoes of its elation it the sibilant sounds of the keys tap tapping as I pour out my soul.

Much have I mused on what I might say. And nothing arose to claim a place, so I write for you now totally naked. Utterly vulnerable. For I can do nothing but surrender to the words that wish to come, aware that there are things to be shared, whether now or in their perfect time, that parts of me find shameful, are terrified to share, lest you love me less, lest you smirk and move on.

And as I drop into a gentle state of enquiry…what is it that fears so? What of me…and therefore, of course, what of you. What parts do we share that so crave validation we will invalidate the whisper of our soul just to let the mind have its mellow way.

I have been listening to some truly fantastic (and I mean this in a number of senses of the word) discourses by the late Joseph Chilton Pearce, who was truly a pioneer of so much, so much of what we might like the world to be Joseph helped to map the territory, wearing lightly an intellect that was astounding in its range and precision, and which, perhaps more importantly, was led by a heart so suffused with love and warmth, so passionate, so delightful, it is impossible not to listen without a regular smile playing across my lips.

I touched on my reasons for exploring Joseph’s work in the previous blog. He gave me the example of the Sri Lankan devotees who will walk 40ft lanes of coals so hot that aluminium melts on touch, without a single hair on their heads being singed. More than this though, and without explicitly articulating it, at least in the discourses I heard, Joseph gave voice to the imbalance that (I believe) threatens to tear apart our existence from within.

It appears to boil down to which of the multitude of stories being created and continued right now do we wish to be a part of?

A story where those we endow with the privilege of governing the systems that (at the moment) are essential for the mass of human kind to enjoy healthy and happy existence, choose to take advantage of acts of atrocity, both real and fake, to further a hideously myopic agenda that can fairly accurately be summed up as: “The rich get richer, the poor lump it and do the grunt work.”

I do not wish to leave this topic. It feels as though we have half-pulled off a plaster. However, with my eyelids closing on me mid sentence and a paragraph now taking at least 6 mins to write…it is only fair to you and to me that we pick up this thread tomorrow.

Wishing you love until then.

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Crash Test Dummies of Human Potential

If today was the day…

An unseen bus, a senseless act, a stubborn fishbone, or any of the infinite ways I might depart…

What would I want to leave for you on this page?

And the flip side…

If I knew I had another ninety, one-hundred years at least still to go. What then? Would my words be any different?

The truth is I’ve been hiding. Hiding behind the layer of a man who thought he had to know. Who thought his every word had to be measured, precise, impactful. And so, terrified by the weight of this need…I said nothing.

I wonder if that feels familiar to you?

How are your multiple personalities? Are you nourished by your Facebook personality? Does your Twitter self thrill you? And how about your preened LinkedIn persona?

Or do they suffocate you at times? Do you ever feel like you’re screaming in an empty room, that echoes back a thousand voices not your own?

I have a hunch…

A tremulous, exquisite seed that my heart cherishes. Go gentle with it, but do question it. It longs to learn to grow. So take it with you as we explore, gently cradle it, never failing to let it feel the wind on the mountain peaks, or the glorious annihilation of the blackness within the deepest caves.

Here’s the hunch…

That maybe, like me, you feel we are careering in a direction we have not sufficiently questioned…assuming gleefully we will launch beyond the stars, never entertaining the prospect there may be a brick wall on the road ahead far sooner than we could conceive.

Understanding innately the indescribably wondrous, yet fragile gossamer thread by which the balance of all life hangs, if you and I were to pause a moment before the scales of our progress, to gaze upon them with eyes of truth, the full weight (pun intended) of the imbalance would likely cause us to wretch…to heave up our incredulity, our convenient flat-packed views.

For our scales are laden with a billion iPhones, heralded as miracles of our advancement…while the life-changing experience of a yogi who appears to an aspirant in a dream is summarily dismissed as chemical imbalance, and probably shut down with valium and prosecco.

The child who gives minute details of the Indian village they lived in their life before being born to western parents, the devotees who can walk across 40ft of burning coals, hot enough to melt aluminium on contact, the ancient earth works many times larger than Stone Henge, that were built, and then deliberately buried 7000 years before the construction of that celebrity of the ancient world…all these examples and more that challenge the bedrock of what it means to be human, of what it might mean to be, we treat like beggars in the street, unaware we are walking past Tesla, Gandhi, Buddha in disguise.

Instead money comes to dominate…as we pay them no mind, invest little significance in what they mean. We ignore the clear truth that we do not have only one road to explore…that indeed alongside the road of our technological potential down which we currently race, there runs a parallel road, one that was once walked by only a brave few, willing to endure the ridicule hurled from the open windows of the cars on technology road.

Now today, there are more and more choosing to switch lanes, but the truth is a brick wall, in the form of something as cosmologically commonplace as a coronal mass ejection, could literally drop a wall devastatingly into the midst of rush hour on technology road.

It is a road I too love to speed along…it is how we are connecting now. But if it is the only road we ever travel, then how much can we ever truly know?

There is human potential and there is technological potential. I believe life calls us now to right the balance. It does not want us to be crash test dummies, studied for clues by archaeologists picking over the dust of what once was a skyscraper.

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