Aloha Greg,
I loved talking with you the other day while you walked and walked. Easy for me to imagine, hard to contemplate actually doing what you’re doing! Loving your journey, it thrills me everyday, inspires me as you always do to be more true to myself and my dreams. Today I stood in the great round shade cast by a huge tulip poplar tree and filled up with the wonder of life . . . I feel most blessed to be curious, to revel in the wonder of this Earth, awash in the mystery of the Universe. So much to nestle into, to rise into, to be with gently.
When I was a kid I was afraid to look up into the stars. They were too much for me to contemplate. I was literally awe-struck and I couldn’t look, I just couldn’t look. Somehow, perhaps through the loneliness, through the broken heartedness of life . . . I don’t know how it happened really . . . but I am big enough to hold the Universe, I can look at the stars and feel safe and at home . . .
The poet says: Our hearts have to break again and again until they’re big enough to hold the whole world.
What that suggests and I believe is that our hearts break in order to expand. A fully broken heart holds infinity . . . I believe that through my own journey through life. Walking walking walking . . . I don’t think there’s another way to come into our fullness than to walk and fall into the arms of all of life, the pain, the sweetness, the loneliness, the companionship we offer ourselves and find in a welcoming smile or the brightness in another’s eyes . . . It’s happening, all of it is happening, and we’re along, we’re along for all of it. No hiding, no running, just present to presence itself.
Inside where I live is everything—easy, hard; good, bad; grown-up, childish—a cacophony of this and that, of the co-existence of opposites. Like the poles on a magnet, this manifest world we live in including ourselves as we know ourselves by name—Gregory, Virginia—include the push and pull, the vagaries of a polaric world. Inside though, way deep inside, is another reality, the one where the peace lies, where all is one, where I am never alone, where I am the divine. As I see it, and truly you know that’s just a moment of seeing, a flash of insight, perhaps true, perhaps not true, doesn’t matter, it’s the way I look at life that brings me the most peace which is what I love and will choose again and again: peace of heart and mind . . .
Ok, so where was I? Oh yes, how I see life: That all that exists is one thing: divinity by any name or no name. Unmanifest divinity saying to itself, “I’m bored” or even “I’m lonely” and beginning that beautiful messy thing called creation, pouring itself into a panoply of forms—stars and earths, oceans and mountains, trees and animals, humans (What was I thinking, oh I as divinity?). Pouring myself into the current 7+ billion humans, letting them discover over many decades who they each really are . . . That they are all “I am”, that they are one, that to help one is to help oneself, to hurt one is to hurt oneself, that to love one is to love oneself . . . What an unfolding of the Great Mystery!
If I were a university, I would offer a required course with each student inventing their own walkabout as it might be, a canoe-about, a fly-about, a swim-about, who knows what we humans can get up to!
I love you, Grandma
