LETTERS

Letters, Love Letters, Letters to Self.

Written, sent, saved, read, and reread

shredded, soaked, shaped, burned, and released to the wind and sky

long ago letters, saved stories, reaching out thru a time of expansion, of breathing into the world, a space of exploration into the nature of being, releasing the thoughts that once contained longing, hope, doubt…

into thin air, cold winter air… then shredded into water, pure water, waves into ocean, as clouds across the sky float and form into shapes, transforming into nothingness

a love of life, a time of freedom unattached to the world of becoming, a space of light.

“Songs of the Cotton Grass” - music on video by Hilary Tann www.hilarytann.com

so the darkness shall be the light and the stillness shall be the dancing. t.s. eliot

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you which shall be the darkness of God.

As, in a theatre, the lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed With a hollow rumble of wing, with a movement of darkness on darkness, and we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama and the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations and the conversation rises and slowly fades into the silence and you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about; or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing;

There is yet faith, but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

Swirling flowing energy

We sit in our world of human beingness and are mind-boggled at our own destructive machinations, hateful enterprises, and greedy systems, yet despite this we have deep intangible knowledge of beauty and love. We wonder at how the push-pull of Shiva’s destructive and transformative powers surrounds us even as we find ourselves in the Chinese Year of the Snake, a time of deep thinking, patience, and adaptability… I note that, Vasuki, the snake around Shiva’s neck represents the control of fear and ego.

Moving into the center and flowing out, we are surrounded by energetic winds sowing of seeds of change, transforming our being into pure, free, forever. That is all there is. Be well.

"The Iceman Cometh"

"The Iceman Cometh" is one of Eugene O'Neill’s most renowned plays, written in 1939. The play is a tragic exploration of self-delusion, despair, and the human need for illusion in order to cope with life’s harsh realities. The Iceman Cometh delves deep into the psychology of its characters, as they are forced to confront the truth about their lives.

Now, weeks after I started writing this, I am full of sun and snow, full of exuberant and quiet voices, full of life and death. We live in an extraordinary time of life, questioning, doubt, and faith. How spectacular to be here now!

So let the sun shine in!

We dream, we hope, we plan, and sometimes we just breathe… letting whatever might surrounds us take hold. We create life as we breathe and out of that unfolds extraordinary things, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes the good comes as new life — a flowering winter cactus or a new baby; sometimes we learn the pain of others, along with our own aging bodies; and sometimes the mystery takes us beyond our own heart and body to another dimension of being.

Opening the awareness of being part of an entire universe is beyond imagination, beyond individual existence, beyond knowing. It is not something we can paint or write or describe in any specific way, but it is something we can try to live. It can shape what and how we see our days. It can fill our hearts with light. So let the sun shine in!

Where do we stand in changing conditions.

Standing in the flow of sticks, I wonder.

Where do we stand in changing conditions? Those ones that continually challenge our trust, our knowledge, and our conscience from the changeling aspects of human politics, ongoing shift in seasons and growing climatic impact of weather across our lands to the environmental pain of war across our planet?

Do we stand with the alignment of the never ceasing forces, the undercurrents of greed and fear that pull us into darkness? Or, are we more the driftwood amongst the watery currents looking like a Louise Nevelson sculpture of found objects, all in alignment with the flow of time, a passive resource waiting to reach the Ocean? Then of course, we could be the shadow play, the spiritual embodiment, that like a projection onto the physical realm is a reflection of the unending Universe?

Traveling Light

We are creatures of habit, of desire, of place; we are a bundle of nerves. We follow the sun whether looking for heat or shade; we are diurnal beings even as we live and work beyond the timeclock of our lives.

With changing daylight hours and seasonal hints of colder weather, a day full of sunrays attracts and brings us out into the light. Death, and war, and floods, and fires are pervasive; they are defining this age… Yet a day can be peace, a day can be breath, a day can be all we know….

We can Know two things - the immensity of the Universe and the individuality of our lives. They are not be exclusive realms. They are in fact one and the same. They exist individuated just as we see waves are made of the ocean, and ocean is made visible by the waves. So are we… a ripple, a tsunami, a rogue wave, all of it, together in a vastness of ocean? We are That. We are ocean even as it crashes against the shores of humanity. We are both wave and ocean.

The Diamond Sutra

The Diamond Sutra was printed over 1,100 years ago by Wang Jie. According to an article in the Smithsonian by Jason Daley in 2016, Jie commissioned the block printer to create a 17-and-a-half-foot-long scroll of the sacred Buddhist text on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong (ie 868 A.D.) Today the scroll is at The British Museum.

The Diamond Sutra is a Sanskrit text translated into Chinese and hidden in the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas around the year 1,000. It is called Diamond as “the sutra helps cut thru perceptions of the world and its illusions” explains Susan Whitfield. “We just think we exist as individuals but we don’t, in fact, we’re in a state of complete non-duality: there are no individuals, no sentient beings,” she writes.

Just as snowflakes are individually unique, they are made of the same water, and these water vapors pass through the same process of freezing around a nucleus turning into the six-armed crystalline form of snowflake. And then when each melts and joins the others, they flow together to the ocean, melding into one, into the source of all we know.

I am working on my grandmother’s archives. Stashed in boxes rather than caves, they carry a family trajectory across time and place. They talk of lineage and exploration, of daily details and social order. They bring me to a time of writing and reflection. Each letter, article, journal is unique but the same; they are mere words on a page. They are not illuminated manuscripts, yet they do stand for a moment in a life, a full life…. one full of storytelling, adventure, good humour, and elegance. And so we create the path we walk.