magic carpet

sacred ground

It’s a full moon on Thursday, and I hope to be fully over Covid by then. It wasn’t the Yuletide I was expecting, and brought to mind the line “the best laid plans of mice and men”, which is the anglicised version of the line from ‘To a Mouse’ by Robert Burns, a poem that serves to reminds us we have control over very little.

It’s Burns night at the end of the month, just to give a tip of the hat to our Scottish brothers and sisters .

 There’s mist rising from the river this morning adding a touch of silver to the grey of the coming day,  the third of the new year.

A great many wishes for happiness are exchanged at the beginning of our new years. And wishes, like hope, are not something that can be measured, but are evident in the felt sense, in the field of wordless experience that we share — in which we can also find empathy, desire, mutuality, fondness, respect, or any of the other words that are synonyms for love.

We hold hope and wishes in the here and now, and project them into the future, the unknowable, like dream seeds. 

How we respond to whatever emerges from the unknowable is perhaps the only thing we have control over.

If we open ourselves to whatever arises in the moment, we enter into the realm of feeling all that comes forth more deeply. 

There is an expansion in all directions, and the full arc of the spectrum that is the human experience is revealed — in amongst which is joy and sorrow, belonging and isolation, love and malevolence.

How alive do we dare to be?

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You can access many of the images taken by the Hubble space telescope on the NASA website. There’s one of the Jewel Bug Nebula, its fabric billowing outward in wave and circle forms. It is said that these luminescent threads, in part, are the materials from which we and all things are woven.

Last night, a gentle man I once knew jumped to his death from a building in California. At approximately the same time, as I lay awake in the dawn hours here in England, a bird flew into an upstairs windowpane with a loud thump, falling dead to the ground below.

May they ride together on a carpet of colour, inhabiting the place where inner and outer space are indistinguishable.

Of late, my daily meditations have taken the form of a mantra:

My existence is fragile, my fragility sits within an infinite mystery.

My existence is fragile, my fragility sits within an infinite mystery.

My existence is fragile, my fragility sits within an infinite mystery.

During the first weeks of practice, when I let the truth of it sink in, it triggered a considerable amount of anxiety, followed by a spell of existential impotence and then, eventually, a sense of spaciousness.

Accepting the full scale of human fragility means that the inevitability of loss, in the natural order of things, is held in plain sight, so we are not blindsided by it when it comes.

From there, joyously, nothing can ever be taken for granted again, least of all those closest to us with whom we share a path, a blessing that will be all too short-lived due to divergence, or death.

Where there is potential for acceptance and mutual healing in relationship, the ground of that union becomes sacred, a foundation for a wordless prayer that is expressed in every action and every breath—I hope this message comes through clear, my dear.

Music by Yoav and Harry Sever