A stillness that just about bursts

Listening to the Silence Living Life Following Jesus

There is animated conversation. Loud. Sometimes I think they may be quarreling. It's not a language I know. But it could well be that they are talking enthusiastically about a generous inheritance they've just received, or a wedding that they are preparing for, or the announcement of something important like the birth of the first great grandson. Who knows?

If I keep the doors of my senses open, I am inclined to think that all of life passes through them. But if I shut them and descend into a valley within me that sits close by my senses, then I become aware of a vastness, beyond the reach of my senses.

There it is colored with unknown colors. There it stirs with silence that is audible and penetrating. There it holds me in cushions of shifting stillness, a glorious mosaic of stories yet to be told. A stillness that just about bursts within me.

The Taste

A walnut kernel shaken against its shell makes
a delicate sound, but

the walnut taste and the sweet oil inside makes
unstruck music. Mystics

call the shell rattling talk, the other, the taste
of silence. We've been speaking

poetry and opening so-called secrets of soul growth
long enough. After

days of feasting, fast, after days of sleeping, stay
awake one night, after these

times of bitter storytelling, joking and serious
considerations, we should

give ourselves two days between layers of baklava
in the quiet seclusion where

soul sweetens and thrives more than with language,

I hear nothing in my ear
but your voice. Heart has

plundered mind of all its
eloquence. Love writes

a transparent calligraphy, so
on the empty page my soul can

read and recollect.

Rumi in The Soul of Rumi by Coleman Barks

I am Blessed and I Bless

My desk sits in front of a wide glass window through which I look up into the branches of ancient fig trees. Peeps of ice blue sky fill the spaces between branches and leaves, some of which are drenched in spring’s sunlight, others in shadows of varying contrast.

Rainbow lorikeets make good use of the trees while offering a different voice to the urban sounds of traffic and domestic equipment. It is easily possible to forget that I am only a fifteen minute walk to the city.

What makes this dwelling home after twelve months of a somewhat nomadic existence? It is knowing that I won’t have to move unless I want to. Having moved house six times in the last ten years because landlords have decided to sell or raise the rent to levels I have not been able to afford, it has become the most relevant reason.

So I have been setting up home once again. It has been a joyous experience. Finding new items to bring into my space while delighting in the pleasant surprise of unpacking old favorites has been part of this joy.

This move is different to all other moves because this time, my children have not moved with me. I feel as if I have been instructed to start from scratch. It’s not just a new home. It’s not just a new beginning. It’s a new life.

It’s not that the old has been discarded. It is rather that the old has transformed and I must be ready to meet it on fresh terms. And the old includes who I have been and how I have been, not just a few months or years ago but even a few moments ago, a second ago!

In all this movement and change, and now this settling down, I feel the strength and the ever-growing sense of two things – Gratitude and Faith.

Deepening gratitude, strengthening faith.

And so I am blessed. And so I bless.

May I live for the greatness and goodness of all.

You wreck my shop and my house and now my heart, but
how can I run from what

gives me life? I’m weary of personal worrying, in love
with the art of madness!

Jalal Ad-Din Rumi Translated by Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi

Two Apparent Worlds, One Reality

I've been back in Brisbane a week now! I have left one 'world' and returned to another. But of course, they are interconnected and I am not the only interconnecting thread either! So much else in this physical form of consciousness connects them - the air, the ocean, the aircraft that took me from one to the other, the people that were on that plane, the communication between the two and so on. And how vastly different these worlds appear to me! Yet, how much a part of both I feel!

The ability to travel such great distances in such short periods of time allows for rather fascinating experiences. For instance, I find my typical perceptions of difference rapidly clouding in the penetrating realizations of sameness.

My access to people in both 'worlds' gives me a sense of continuity and connectivity between them. For instance, while I was with my brother who is currently only mobile by means of a wheelchair, I noticed some design drawbacks in the wheelchair. Upon returning to Brisbane, I have found myself in the home of another person who uses a wheelchair, the design of which I consider ideal. I happened to think to myself how nice it would be if my brother also had something similar. A day later, I receive an email from another brother saying he had found a wheelchair that, by his description, is rather like the one I've seen here! And this has happened without my even mentioning wheelchairs to my brother!

I guess what I am trying to say in all this is that my sense of continuity and connectivity is one that has perhaps been heightened by my travels between these 'worlds'. The truth of the matter, however, is that this continuity and connectivity have always been. They just hasn't been noticed.

Right now, across the world, there must be others doing something similar to what I am doing right now, feeling some of the things I am feeling, having needs and desires similar to mine. Right now, across the world, there are people being abused, entertained or cared for. Common needs, common emotions, just different details that thread our individual stories; individual stories given meaning by the enchanting and forever unfolding story of divine love!

I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story.
My place is the placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one
and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner,
only that breath breathing human being.

Jalal-Ad-Din Rumi at http://enlightenedbeings.com/rumi.html

That window in my heart

What change! I am, at what I still refer to as, 'home' although I first left it over thirty years ago! Since then, I have visited, on average, once every two to three years. Yet, it remains a place of strong sentiments, triggered by memories that awaken unpredictably.

Voices, smells, scenes that I rush past in a moving car, a name mentioned here, family friends who drop by without warning, certain that they are always welcome, and they are of course... All these and more remind me of a time and place and family that are no more, in some sense, yet by no means lost. They are all there, every bit of them, in the secure vaults of my memory, released, from time to time, by daily moments.

I watch my oldest brother, a shadow of his former self following an operation several months ago to remove a tumour in his brain. I watch his inability to care for himself or to speak for himself. I watch as he is fed and cleaned and changed by a number of caring, competent hands. I watch as he is prompted to speak and answer questions as if a child. I watch as if I had expected to see all this. I watch as I become aware that regardless of my expectations, I have been shocked and I am deeply, deeply saddened.

I find myself resisting old memories, fearing that they will only make the difference between what was and what is simply too unbearable. It is better, I say to myself, to remain right here and now. And mostly I do. But in the two days that I have been here, I have sobbed in the confines of our daily family prayer. This has been the only time when the gulf between Life Was and Life Is has stretched so far that it has torn the heart which holds all three.

How can the human being have such indignity enforced on it? How can what so majestically was have become so unceremoniously is? And yet, these moment to moment displays of tenderness, caring, patience, unconditional love, encouragement, faith...where do these come from, if not from that same gulf which separates was and is? It is as if a window has appeared in my heart and through it, I see god in many forms.

Listen, open a window to God
and begin to delight yourself
by gazing upon Him through the opening.
The business of love is to make that window in the heart,
for the breast is illumined by the beauty of the Beloved.
Gaze incessantly on the face of the Beloved!
Listen, this is in your power, my friend!

Jalal-al-Din Rumi