Rain

It is a Tuesday morning in January. The summer solstice has passed and the cool hint of approaching winter has been in the air since.

The tide has turned. It is melancholy in midsummer with the promise of reprieve from too much magnificence.

My doors and windows are wide open and outside the grey sky is pouring down. The music inside is the perfect accompaniment. I am so moved.

Rain brings joyful scents and stirring moods, soaking the earth and my soul with adoration. Music distills from the same place, precipitating like blessings from the eternal.

Birds are back on the lawn now that the sky water has subsided, celebrating the bread I put out for them, flapping, hopping and chirping colourfully, almost as happy as me.

And the music, oh, the music!

Sometimes you can write like rain, for no reason at all.

Originality

Are you being original in what you say and do? Are you being yourself?

It is easier said than done. There, I’ve just used a cliché.

Language is an external construct that we learn and then use with our personal voice, and so it is not truly original. But it is prudent to use language consciously and to speak truthfully.

To articulate your experience your way, you need to pay attention. You need to be alert to pressures of conformity and collective thinking.

Are you a clone? Are you picking up sayings because someone else, who picked them up like the clap, is slinging them around? Cute as they may be, they may not be you. Woo hoo! They may feel fun but do you just use them to impress? But I digress...

No, I don’t! That’s another right there that many people use in their writing. Why digress, especially in written form? Why then admit to it instead of editing the detour out? Why think it’s funny?

Maybe the first person who said it was ingenious and hilarious, but on every other blog? Rather find your own voice.

Tune in and speak sincerely. Write the real thing. Make it a meditation. Presence and spontaneity draw you towards originality and thinking takes you away from it.

Be aware of the superficial self and its propensity for mimicry. Let it go, and go deeper.

Feel what you feel and let words find themselves for expressing it. Say those instead. Why? Ooh, that’s one of my least favourite!

Writing and speaking are living art, make them original.

Returns

Life is not a business. Living is not a trade.

The important things have no value and are at the same time priceless. So if you understand them in terms of exchange, you miss their essence and make them mundane.

If you give love and expect something in return, it is not love that you give and it is not true giving.

If you do things because you want something back, you are living an ego-based existence, dependent on other people for your fleeting happiness.

You are mired in manipulation. Everything in your life becomes conditional. And that’s no fun!

It makes you just a merchant, market-bound and missing the natural wonder. Tallying is your religion and feeling cheated an inevitable consequence.

That, of course, makes you prone to sneaking a little bit extra here and there for yourself. And why not? You aren’t getting anything true or beautiful from the transaction.

Next thing death comes and it doesn’t do business, it just declares you bankrupt. Everything breaks even in the end and if you didn’t realise that along the way and live for the miracle not the money, you missed out with no refund.

If you tried to conduct your relationships as an enterprise, you realise that you let those pass you by, too. Most of all, your inner wealth went untapped.

Ironically, when you live with unconditional love, giving for the sheer joy of it without expecting anything in return, and being happy and fulfiled in your own being, the harvests are boundless.

Life’s a celebration not a struggle, a dance not a deal.

Your calling

Your calling is unlikely to come out of something you already know.

We try to solve our situations with the known, but that is such a small piece of what is. Our calling merges with what is, but it emerges from the unknown and the unknowable.

Our ability to live fully is in our ability to stop churning through the known and to surrender to what is beyond it. You calling is calling from beyond.

I am listening to mine. I have no idea what it is. It is deeper than my current awareness, unfathomable to me yet accessible. I am listening.

I am clearing the deck of my little ship and letting the oceanic depths of my being speak to me. And I am listening.

Hearing happens when speaking stops, when the noise dies down. There is a gap between thoughts where the whole of existence suddenly speaks in silence.

It fills you with such tremendous insight, inspiration and joy that doing becomes absurd. All that feels appropriate is being fully alive and spreading consciousness. You become a fountain of beauty.

Your calling is something new. It may express itself using the tools you already know and have, but it has no form at this point.

It is being born, coming into manifestation. Can you feel it? Dig deep and be, stop thinking and feel.

Your calling is in your being.

Stories

How you feel about your life is largely a function of the story you tell yourself. This is living unconsciously, which makes you a character in a drama, the victim of narrative.

Social mythology would have you understand yourself in terms of the tale others tell you and you subscribe to, which is not unfounded, but you are not really that.

On one level, the sequence of events are a story playing itself out and we are each on the journey of living it through interpretation. On a deeper level, we are just consciousness.

Stories are not present, they are in the mind, understandings comprising the constructs we have gathered from society. When you are in your story, you are not here now.

It’s like being in a cinema watching a movie. You are following the story but it is just projected light making a certain sense on your inner screen. The here and now - the seat you are sitting on, the darkness of the room, and the person sitting next to you - is not in your field of attention.

Most of the time, most of us are absorbed in an emotionally charged drama that is hardly real, while reality surrounds us just out of sight. Have you ever turned around while a film is playing and looked at the people sitting in rows? They are transfixed by fantasy, riding a rollercoaster of identification with illusion.

In the cinema, they are escaping real life and living vicariously through a fictitious character. In the realm of narrative, what they would call real life, they are doing the same thing! The fictitious character is the false self they feel is them.

Real life is outside the story, in the present. It is detached from drama, which is still there but not dominant. The conscious self is not lost in identification with the illusion.

When you access the present, it frees you from attachment to the story and its histrionics.

Space

Space is spirit. Life is not in things but in the space between them.

The solution to problems is in accessing the space in and around you. The key to being yourself and connecting with others is in space.

So first, access the space everywhere. Look at the room you are in, it is essentially space. What makes it a room is the room in it. The walls and roof create a form but it is the nothingness that makes up most of what is, or isn’t there.

When you become aware of the space rather than the things, you invert your attention, which makes you available to what is possible rather than what has already formed.

Second, give yourself space. We strangle ourselves with tension, anxiety and expectation. Let go of that and allow the space that is within you to be.

You are not the molecules that comprise your body, you are the emptiness between and inside them. You are not your personality, you are the mystery. Sit with that.

Third, give other people space. They have been beaten into submission their whole lives and denied freedom to be who they are, and you know exactly what that is like.

From your awareness of space, extend that gift of the eternal to them. Let them be, be themselves with you.

When you feel the space that makes up everything, you open to the wonder of who we really are.

Beauty

Beauty is like truth, you cannot describe it. You cannot put it into words. As soon as you voice it or even think about it, it slips away. Beauty and truth can only exist in silence.

They can only be communicated in silence, too. If you want to share them with someone, both of you will have to be still. You will have to put the mind aside and be present.

The flow of thoughts, the urge to label things, and the compulsion to limp along using verbal communication will have to give way to the intense yet subtle communion of the unspoken.

Nothing that the mind can understand is of any true value or beauty. Nothing of true value and beauty can be understood or expressed using the mind.

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth can never be articulated using words. Yet courts around the world base their trade on it every day! That shows you the absurdity of the system, if you need reminding.

The joys of the heart might burst forth into words because we are so conditioned to use them, and they may help convey some of the feeling, but it is what they are pointing to that matters.

These words written here are merely pointing to something. The beauty is not in them but beyond. I am inviting you to the beyond.

True beauty remains unspoken.