Tag Archives: livingness

taking it all to heart

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Photograph by Alan Larus

what shall it profit me to know
that the leaf
has no color, shape or form
save those assigned by a bunch of brain cells?

to know that it has no existence
in time or space
aside from the space-time grid in my memory?

to know that it isn’t really anointed with
sparkling diamonds of dew
and it doesn’t really tremble
in the delicate dawn sunlight?

to know that all this appearance
is a figment of imagination?

in other words,
what’s the big deal to know
that form is emptiness?

if I stop there
where does it leave my heart?

I’ll tell you:
high and very very dry

but when I fall
into the suchness of the leaf
and wear its diamonds with delight
on my soft velvet greenness,
when I feel its quiver as my own
and float in its airy spaciousness

then I find, to my astonishment,
that the leaf’s gorgeous, sensuous livingness
and my own
cannot be wrenched apart

that’s when my heart leaps with juicy joy
and tears moisten my cheeks;
that’s when emptiness reveals itself
as none other than form,
and it’s so very clear
that love lies in the looking

–

It’s odd how outpourings are triggered. This morning this quote from the Bible fluttered across mindspace during a rapturous morning ‘meditation’. The last time I heard – or thought about – this quote was probably more than fifty years ago, when it was thrown, by a seriously strict teacher, at my friend and me for helping each other (cheating!) in a high school exam:

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
– Mark 8:36 King James Bible “Authorized Version”, Cambridge Edition

It’s normally taken to refer to greed, ill-gotten gains and the loss of integrity, but after the poem wrote itself down I realized my take had shifted, or expanded. I think it could also apply thus:
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain intellectual knowledge of the world, and lose his own heart’s intimate intelligence?

The Heart Sutra had to get a word in as well. Mark the Apostle meets Avolokitesvara. You never can tell what/who will turn up on retreat!

Photograph by Alan Larus, who tells me he just “clicks the button”. His modesty is as awesome as his artwork.

from longing to belonging

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Of late I’ve been marveling at the profound depth and breadth of this uncensored, unresisted, unfiltered experience of livingness. I’ve written about the immense sorrow and the exalted joyfulness and everything in between. It’s been both wondrous and humbling to realize how I managed, for decades, to make sure the door to unlimited livingness was kept safely chain-locked. Only manageable peeks allowed! Equilibrium must be maintained – no messy wetness around the eyelashes eh?

Well that’s all herstory now, as the scribblings here and elsewhere have made explicit. So it was only fitting that I would find myself – this past week – on retreat with a teacher whose immense and compassionate wisdom encompasses the limitless interbeing of life. And whose passion is the sharing of that wisdom.

Falling into this gracious and immeasurable Awareness and knowing it as ‘I’ is a big enough shock. Realizing that this inescapable un-locatable … whateveritis … melts one into seamless intimacy with the movement of Life in its inconceivable creative unfolding is the aftershock that keeps coming and coming and coming like an unstoppable orgasm.

Tarchin Hearn is wise to this. I think he’s a shaman disguised as a very non-sectarian Buddhist. He would chuckle and grin widely. I could write much about my week with him; how he helped me ‘adjust’ to this intimacy, how he opened up fresh vistas of wonderment and refreshed that soft fragile childlike curiosity that had been sidelined over the last difficult decade. But today I just want to offer you a taste of his gentle eco-poetry.
– ml

Going for refuge is ‘longing.’

Being refuge is ‘belonging.’

Everything mirroring, echoing, and creatively responding.
This mysterious temple of knowing.
This paramecium, this bacteria, this person,
this family, this forest, this butterfly,
each a temple of uniqueness,
mutually longing for
and belonging in
every other temple of longing and belonging.
Ocean currents of temple-ing
floating in sensual warmth of never ending
consummation and freshness.

– Tarchin Hearn

http://www.greendharmatreasury.org/
 

looking for the perfect lover?

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Are you looking for a relationship in which you will feel unconditionally accepted and loved, where there’s complete consistency that you can trust, where jealousy, competition and pride don’t rear their ugly heads, where absolutely no effort is required to sustain or maintain the dynamics, where there is no sense of separation between you and your beloved, and where you are 100% free to be ‘who you are’ and express your ‘self?’

If I told you that you could have it all would you believe me? Would you check it out for yourself? Would you suspend every desire and every story about your past, present and future? Would you suspend the need, the compulsion, to be ‘in a relationship?’ Just for an experiment, just to investigate?

Would you settle on your zafu, or whatever landing/launching pad you prefer, and look – I mean really look – at what’s looking? Look into what’s knowing and experiencing this livingness that wears your name?

The look-ing is the Lover.
The know-ing is the Lover.
The experience-ing is the Lover.
The wide-awake spacious Aware-ing that is ‘I’ is the Lover.

Die into the inescapable presence of the Lover, beloved.

And then you will know that ‘relationship’ is an obsolete notion.

There is only the Lover.

~ miriam louisa

what is it with steps and falling?

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An old friend dropped this question into a recent email. It took me a while to understand where she was ‘coming from’ – it’s been a long while since analyzing events for their ‘deeper’ meaning has interested me. But I still love a good question, so I took a look.

I now understand that how a question is answered depends on where it’s flying in from. If I am zipped into my bodysuit – busy being a body – steps are solid forms to be negotiated in space and time. Falling happens when space and time are out of sync. Falling hurts; body might be crippled or disfigured. It’s an experience to be avoided: fear is body’s brand.

If I’m aloft in the thought-propelled balloon called mind, a fall down steps will trigger endless analysis of what it really means, what I need to know that I’m not looking at, what I need to avoid, what I must fix, change, rewrite about the story of “my life.” It will keep me very busy, very anxious, and very stressed out.

If I am neither body nor mind, but the spacious aware-ing that they and all their activities arise within – energy is simply dancing. It appears to take a tumble. It appears to be painful. It has no owner; it wears no name. Since there is no division possible in spaciousness, denial isn’t an option – nor is acceptance! Awareness knows itself intimately. And it knows exactly what’s needed for healing: rest and relaxation.

What is it with steps and falling? It’s a gift. It’s pure grace. The blessing of injury is that it delivers you, helpless and humbled, back to base: relaxation as Life, as the pure Light of awake, aware Livingness.

Gratitude!

~ miriam louisa