Tag: intuition

Totems

After an otherworldy dream last night, I was told to “follow my nose”, again. The voice spoke up at various times today – choose a different thought, a different way of responding, a different way of expressing myself; if even the slightest change in nuance, if even with just one word, and see. So I listened and did what it said.

Later in the day I was driving to pick something up, and on my way the voice said, “go that way”, so I took a detour. As I drove up the steep hill I happened upon a sign ‘Unitarian Universalist Church, this way’, so I followed the arrow on a steep right turn further up. “What a nice surprise, I didn’t know this church was out here” I thought. The gate to the driveway was open so I went through and up, just to see the view from the top of the hill. Empty parking lot of course, all doors closed as I figured, only signs of love.

Then I drove back down to the gate, and in the five minutes I’d decided to get out of my car at the church and look around, someone had closed the gate, and padlocked it. My car and I were trapped and the sun was about to start going down. I looked back up the hill towards the church and in the distance saw an elderly man, with a dog. I drove back up to him thinking “oh please let him be an employee,” in hopes he’d be able to let me out. No he was just a neighbor on a walk, he said. He didn’t notice the gate close either. He could walk around it, but no car could get out.

I was about to turn my car around to go back down to think about what I could possibly do or if there was a number to call. But before I turned, “can’t see, is your dog near my car?” as I didn’t want to risk hitting it. He said “dog? oh no, that’s a coyote, see look there he is”. I turned around and saw, very close, standing on the edge of the hill, the first and only coyote I’ve ever seen in Marin. He looked at me and, almost as fast as I got to contemplate him, then he took leave of us over the edge and out of sight. I knew then, ah, that’s why I came up here, and that’s why the gate closed me in, and that’s why that man was here; so I could see that coyote. I was freed from the iron gate ten minutes later. The how doesn’t matter.

Then I came across this poem by David Whyte:

RUNNING TO SEE THE MOON

I will become
the madman running
to see the moon
in the window,

the hawk
I saw tracing the cliff edge
above the river.

I will be the man
I have pursued all along
and finally caught.

I will be
all my intuitions
and all my desires
and then I will walk
slowly down the steps
as if dressed in white
and wade into
the water
for a second baptism.

I will be like
someone who cannot
hide their love
but
my joy will
become ordinary
and everyday
and like a lover
I will find out
exactly what it is like
to be the happiest,
the only one in creation
to really understand
how much,
I’m just
a hair’s breadth
from dying.

The Bottom Half

img_20190704_0855530148156238255669602262.jpg

“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards of us all.”
-Abraham Lincoln

Donate, protest, keep sharing, exposing and doing what you can. Do the right thing, don’t look away.

That is the top half of freedom. The bottom half hides in a dark well, looking up. Another kind of protest, a quiet conviction FOR something, a belief, a knowing that burns truth and passion into your soul. The thing, or things, the parts of yourself that fascinate and excite you, and scare the shit out of you. The heartfires you want to pursue, the love you want to surrender to, the power you want to inhabit. But you’re afraid to admit it and say it out loud, especially to yourself. Because once you do, you will have to do something about it. It commands your attention. And you know that if you ignore it, you won’t be able to live with yourself.

Eckart Tolle said that his life changing moment came when he heard the words “I can’t live with myself any longer”. The awakened question appeared, “who is the ‘I’ that I can’t live with?”

Who is the ‘I’ that’s talking to the little suffering self that I think is me?

To feel that ‘I’, that voice, the entity that’s watching, is to know it surrounds you and IS you at the same time. That voice, that feeling, knows who you are and what you’re here to be. It speaks louder and feels stronger than who you’re not, while the skittering monkeymind self runs around in a junkyard, trying to drown it out. It bangs on cans and spins circles in the garbage with distractions and arguments. But the “I” inside and all around is incessantly still and patient. It only wants your emergence out of illusion. And it won’t shut up, ever.

The trials of life, and resistance to them, of giving up and starting over, and over again, through it all I begin to hear more of what this other “I” tells me. Especially when what it’s saying pisses me off; because dammit I can’t escape it. The truth has a funny way of backing us into a corner. It nags you in the back seat, and floats around in your depths. Pull it up and to the front, let it breathe fresh air. Fight, thrash and cry with it. Your tears unleash it and will calm you down. The feelings felt, the words finally spoken, this other “I” moves in and takes charge.

Drive where it tells you, take the lid off the well. There’s nowhere to go but beyond what you were. Hidden in dark water, asleep in the dirt; you’ll wake up to the sky, in the garden.