THE GORGE
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Held in This beauty running in the palm of This hand a life askew acrylic hard opens Seurat soft tingly flecked swooning Me is this field cricket strawstem cadences tucking tails of hours in moments mouths long hot sheets of light |
All Beings Are Creators Equal
Vision: A coach speeds on, through a dip in the road, entirely underwater.
We get through by going “downward” as much as “upward.”
Some paths to awakening pass through sleep. After our mind has taken in all it can, our meditations may take us into a gentle slumber, a trusting healing rest. The holiness can then filter up through the unguarded unconscious, everything of which we will ever have need. Depth, profundity, roots. The eyes close in contemplation and in sleep.
“Higher” functions in the body possess the same worth as the functions lower down in our multi-cellular communities. The last shall tie for first. The most self-sacrificing self-effacing organelles act within us with unceasing perfection.
We have no hierarchy of humans and other creatures, nobody that is only an instrument rather than a divine center in its own right, though we are all servants one to another. God As, not God has. All our names are writ in heaven.
The animals at the top of the food chain hold the selfsame rank with the humblest members or the Earth beneath. 
All of us manifest the Only Life. All Beings are creators equal.
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We ride the backs of animals and love but when Frog hops through loops of its own tongue or when we slide down the slick sickle of Snail’s shell (braided snakes inside its sky) In outland tongues these words all interchange |
Walked for hours in the woods. Without the ego’s edifices interfering, nature is the Garden of Eden. We don’t “have” bodies, we are the Body. Surpassing the false sense of separation, we sink into the present reality, a camouflaged fawn amongst brindled branches, become the universal Body.
“Matter” is Mutter, Mother, remember, not physical. Divine Consciousness Is divine Substance.
A clifftop on the Rogue River, I’m holding a staff. The pole feels like a piling midst a storm, like absolute stillness. Falling into reality.
Standing at the top of a gorge the unity Flying down into the greenery
Swiralling masses of vines, trees smothered in ivy and holly
birds whistling and insects chirring, darting between treetops
thicknesses of pine needles, yellow leaves, bare limbs, melange of “living” and of decomposing
in the dappled Cathedral light heavy aroma like ripe or rotting pears
all together in flux plunged into the gorge
Earth, image of central oneness, with all us flowers festooning its outer surface.
We are children of Earth, Earth a metaphor appearing in our awareness for God coming into Being, creating everyone, holding and upholding and sustaining and totally supplying and interweaving everyone, everywhere, the center of all, the inside, unnoticeably immense.
Principle and Prayer
The Natural Principle: God imparts Its waving beauty through nature, revealing the Nature of our Origin as clearly as our awareness receives it at the moment.
Meditating within Nature, we commune, immerse, interpenetrate, we might inhale all our surroundings with each breath. The Principles flock to us, we’re sublimely embodied.
Nature faithfully stays always round about us as we heroically, loopily limp forward. It will show forth the greater splendor to our transmuted senses when we get where we’re now going, where we now are.
The Portals of Wilderness
The natural world envelops our endeavors, and so it presents a doorway to our divine Self. In our perception of nature we have an admixture of human belief, and indeed of the universal sense of separation that wells up progressively within all living things: seeing pollution and desperate geocidal destruction everywhere; seeing nature as deadly warfare. Yet from these winding sidepaths we learn more about our invulnerable godly Body appearing as our world, about the surety of supply, about peace. And as we develop, we find a land of greater mystery, awe and harmony. Deeper metaphors are shown us. Utter holy beauty: Declaim it in silence.
. Our visions and revisions are an open-ended path, the birth canal of God. The spiritual life is drawing us up, as wax rises through a wick into flame, utilizing and incorporating our mental and physical awareness, and every grievous error and humanly dreamed hardship, to its greater purpose.
Nature around us is not a material object, nor do we settle back with it as an end in itself. As we use an artistically informed sense to fathom a painting or music, we all innately tap our spiritual Consciousness to fully thrill and surrender into Nature.
The Imperceptible is felt, fulfilling Itself by appearing as the Earth. Our rocky pilgrimage unpredictably roams from glory to glory. When we lift up our eyes for help, we find that the poetry of our inner and outer life is the green new growth on the world tree, as it springs from our roots in the flawless invisible noumenal generator through the opulent trunk of nature.
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Lie Under Trees Step out the door and sight the hills Walk to the woods and into them Lie under trees on damp earth Blow through our roots driving us skyways Foliate spirally Flutter each cell Be shone through Feel the wind breathe |
Rattlesnake
First it fled over a hundred yards away. Then when we decided to think lovingly towards it, the rattlesnake returned to a couple of feet from us and we looked at each other several minutes in wonder.
Thought, well there wouldn’t be ants around in winter anyway. Immediately ants arrived, left after they taught class.
Every smallest thing mirrors perfection.
It crossed my mind that there had been no ants for a long time, and then I thought, “There should be lots of ants with my low level of awareness. Uh oh, what if there are ants?” I ran into the kitchen and met two obliging ants.
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My directional signal stopped working. I began unscrewing the glass cover, to see if the bulb might have loosened, and it started signaling. Still, I removed the cover and tapped on the bulb. The All Power was the active ingredient and the technique but Dumbo’s white feather. Yet here the determination to “actually do something” unleashed the change.
Miracles pun so that the unprepared perceive the metaphors as physical. But nature expresses every divine movement to the initiate, offering us to our greater Self.
Psychic activities like levitating can free us yet confuse us, saying “the ground is not the ground.” The ground as a natural metaphor helps us in our story-world, so we want to keep it.
Dream: The sun becomes so huge, we can see the fluffy storms all over its surface; look back, the moon’s getting tiny. Someone has mentally started the earth moving dangerously towards the sun. We can handle the situation.
Meaning: Things I was studying then seemed to denigrate nature. True inclusion on the spiritual path welcomes in the continuum of transcendent being (the sun) and the natural theatre (the moon). The wilds sponge up the silence, and “when the doors of perception are cleansed” we meet paradise in nature.
On the other hand, when we worship within Nature, we may think someone’s knowledge of God in just Its strictly unseen facet is but alienation from reality, whereas broader realization brings us into oneness with everything formed and beyond form, no longer granting power to our disparate pictures of struggling life while still honoring our evolution.
From Glory to Glory
Watching the sunrise on the beach, feeling of the spiritual universe right before us, not hid, if we but see. Everything is a masterpiece, Heaven.
In this gradual sunrise, it’s clear that it’s all a seamlessly changing, utter holy beauty. We enter into perfection, return to the human world where again instructive problems present, then reach a new rung of perfection, the evolving glory of Consciousness. When we know that only God is doing the work, then it’s all opportunity, an open gate.
Everything begins to brighten up before the sun actually jumps the horizon. When the sun’s top first scrolls up, its red reflection hits the wet sand in front of me, entirely bypassing the billions of waves between us and going neither to left nor right but directly to me, where I’m at now.
Sunrise: The light is always greatest right at our feet.
The sunrise can be more spectacular when the rays rise above clouds.
The rosiest coral coloring appears before the dawn, or after sunset, Glory bracketing this life, this daily life and this new day.
By the Ocean at Night
Receding water buoys up the newly approaching waves: things that seem failed and retrograde feed the new advancement with nothing ever lost.
All the people in the world piled up could not replace the volume of water just within my view: the enormity of God compared to our shelled self.
In the dark the white foam crescents gather: the light generated as by a concentration of the darkness.
The action of the ocean produces my insights and grateful emotions as a concentrate, an essence, as it produces its various lifeforms, majestically.
Sea and Sky
The risen sun: the same source simultaneously lighting up the unified sky and multitudinous sea. God created heaven and earth.
Vision: Reflection of the sun in water. The primal energy becomes the formed world yet still is itself.
The sea in luminous white, powder blue, sun gold, lime and plum.
A miraculous homeland---touching deeper into reality, we encounter the all-of-it miracle. God is “above” and “below” human life---these are both the same, complementary metaphors reflecting the fullness of the Source, the scope of our traveling round. Sky/Sea, Mind/Body, Being/Becoming. Relationship in Oneness: We live in a two-branched, di-vine uni-verse.
I want to run off with a beauteous pebble. But it’s part of a gorgeous meadow. I want to carry off the whole world. Let the Earth make off with me.
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Everynight
Velvet hills enfold the yolk of a sun Weeping leaves stroke earth ever so tender Pious ones chant evensongs A farmer scours brown off roughness of his shovel Cabin walls quiet in herbtea glow of trimmed wick On our sides we spoon warm under the comforter |
