Holy Embers of Intentionality
The world with its sharp edges and smoldering corners, its soft spongy sinkholes and its high clear skies marred by lines of chemically seeded air. Its snowy mountains and its fine furry creatures. Its pale gold sunrises and magenta streaked sunsets. Its supernatural forests, green and lush and fecund with organic life and magic. The wind whipping through the leafless trees. The beasts which are indifferent to you, loving, curious or fierce. The glassy lakes and stormy seas. The waters carrying our filth and our purest intentions, a mother, though battered and relentless. Every natural thing, every natural being, wanting love, leaning toward it like a leaf to the light. The expression, the spark of God, through you and through all.
The fallen earth mixed with the echo of the luminous, laden with the heavy burden of dark choices pumping through so many things, so many people, all the institutions. Cruelty and compassion, love and selfishness, fear fear and fear all woven together into the field of fabric which surrounds us. Speeding towards a conclusion, the crumbling edges like powder, time now visible and touchable in the atmosphere as a spider’s web. The real beauty, the real love, the real goodness and creativity can be felt here, even beneath the decay like a dust over everything. Evil in the brick and mortar of structures, materials, actions.
How many can perceive this real beauty, feel the radiant life force pulsating? It doesn’t mean ignoring the rot, pretending it’s not there. Only by relentlessly endeavoring to see things for what they are, even if fear or horror or grief are present, can the true spark of good, of love, of the real divinity powering through our forms be experienced.
Most ignore and pretend. They make the sounds of appreciating “nature” or “art” or speak of love, but no senses are truly penetrated. Nothing is fully allowed to seep in and transform those deep tender places beneath the mask of interface. That which is broken down and debased needs to be mourned, to be understood, or how can that which is whole be appreciated?
The weight of the ugly can knock a person down, make them cynical and blind too, if it’s only to the material that they turn their gaze. To see real beauty, to experience real love, means attuning all your senses and awareness to the spiritual expression of that which is not this world yet can be felt within it. It is not the self which can truly know this. It is the essence, the place of connection to divinity, the expression of God, which senses when and only when self releases a little bit, falls away a little bit, to let real illumination, real comprehension inside. To clear away the dead and rotting leaves of borrowed beliefs, of illusory culture and old traumas on repeat, is essential. The fear of exposing that tiny soft vulnerable thing at your core that hasn’t grown up, hasn’t felt air directly on its delicate membrane, must be overcome.
Turning away from serving self has to be done with love and acceptance in order to soothe its animal nature, while at the same time not letting self run wild. Self is not our enemy but a necessary expression of living in the world, simply embodying its directive for survival. Tempering and taming it with love, while learning to direct from the supernatural spark within, to serve the ultimate, means we can play with self, enjoy its camaraderie, its worldly maneuvers. It is both a refinement of self and a release from its frightened talons that is necessary. Self doesn’t dissolve completely but softly recedes.
Letting that which is dying fall away, letting things fall apart, while strengthening the connection to the core. A commitment to ultimate service, to knowing what is God, what God is. A path to feeling that tether within which pulls you inside the great goodness, the truth of all.
There are hours, days, months or years where you might feel no connection at all to this center, to that which is sacred. An unmappable blackness might fill you instead. Can you float there without mollifying, without making up stories or signposts? Do you know in your sinew and your substrate that God is still, always and everywhere present, when you ask yourself truthfully, setting aside the great pain of self for a moment? If you don’t know, can you open to this possibility? Does the material as explanation for itself really make sense? Intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, would any of hold up in an unbiased court or to real scientific rigor?
The soft illumination which can rise from your warm body on a cold night. The inhale filling your lungs and the exhale flowing into the vast expanse, unable ever to be separated out again. Messages carried from your physical body to the non-material—known and recorded every minute of every day. Your signature, your stink and your perfume, the roses of your skin, etched into the living record. Your feelings which are from the purest deep of you—real pain, real love, real pleasure are noted. The false, the sticky and anemic pretenses, are noted too, like so many moldy spores swept up from the corners and cleansed in the great recycler.
When you make too many compromises in living, in working, but most of all in relationships, you weaken your ability to connect to essence and your entire system falters. You become like a fainter and fainter photocopy of the original. Even the structure of self becomes fractured and flimsy and holding that together requires all the strength you have. Your susceptibility to wayward energies, to other people’s choices and intentions, increases dramatically. While you are still seen and touched and held by God, your ability to serve that connection, to feel it, lessens.
Nothing is perfect here yet something perfect can be perceived. No person gets it right all the time but you must ask yourself, to how many false gods have I given my power? How many easy compromises have I made? In little ways and big, can each piece be taken back? Always the same question: do you just want self to be OK or do you want to be a part of the more that is transcendent?
The sacrifice required for real service is in fact no sacrifice at all because you gain everything in return. Some perceive the notion of service to God as somehow limiting, not letting you do what you want, have what you want. They see all they will have to give up. However, real service is radically liberating. It is self that restricts, with all its fears and wants and its constant measuring of experiences, the measuring of its own worth. This is what is deeply exhausting. This is the box that keeps you from expanding into your fullest potential, into the possibility of an overwhelming love. Service means that you let go of self as the driver of the organism. You observe its machinations but they no longer control you.
What wholly motivates, what your true purpose becomes, grows to something much greater. You forget and you slip and when you recommit and refocus, you remember again, feel the release of self-imposed restriction again. Self’s deceptions, self’s insistence that you’ll die or suffer impossibly if you don’t do its bidding become like a theater of the absurd, moving you to tears perhaps, but clearly an artifice.
To stay trapped in the mechanisms of a hungry, striving self is to always be starving, barely getting by on the putrid scraps thrown to you at the curb.
There is the real steam rising and there is the reflection of that column in the mirror. Only one can be touched, inhaled. Only one softens your skin. Desire which burns from real love can discern which is true, which is false. Most are afraid of this and avoid the potential of supernatural heat at all costs. Pure love requires everything that is not that to be released, exterminated, expunged. It is the heights which terrify people the most, not the valleys.
I say the same things over and over because I need to learn the same things over and over, until they are my blood and bones. To see and feel what is true and beautiful here requires unflinching honesty about what is not, both inside and out. The stakes are high, they are everything, and the challenges many. Even still, you were created in love and that can never be undone. You can reject it and reject your part in the whole but not the reality from which you come. The numinous potency of that love exists in each of us, a constant signal within the architecture of our being, however weak or strong or visible or hidden.
Or maybe that potential doesn’t exist in everyone.
Don’t you want to discover how vast your own sublime parameters are?