My love stretches

“Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” Isaiah 5:8

Our obsessive need to build and to own is the very activity that creates loneliness and separation. As our cities grow and our boundaries are stretched we build our homes closer and closer, our fences containing the small piece of Earth we call ‘ours’. And despite this closeness we grow more and more separate. We can never be anything but lonely when we endeavour to own that which can never be ours. Chaining our lover to us will never make us feel more loved but only more alone in our desperate need for love.

I stand alone in the vast prairie of my God and my love stretches beyond where the eye can see, higher than the never-ending sky, deeper than the roots of the growing tree. In my aloneness with my God I am surrounded by multitudes, embraced in God’s vast space by mighty arms that warm me body and soul. I am connected and my web stretches around this Earth, weaving me to you. There are no fences that impede this growth and expansion of this web, no signpost that can restrain me from entering into what is my God’s domain.

Ramblings of a Crazy Woman

Are mine the ramblings of a crazy woman? Am I going down in a blaze of madness believing God speaks to me? When and if my words are ever read will the reader roll her eyes, will he smirk and snicker; will there be a shaking of the head in sympathy?

Yet in my heart of hearts I know God is alive and Nature thrives and that together they are fullness. I know that as sure as I can hear the call of the wren and the fall of the rain I can hear the voice of God speaking to me and the songs of Nature that are the choir.

It is only fear that has me question the stability of my sanity, for I live in a world and at a time that makes every effort to silence the Voice and attribute God’s wisdom to fools who clutch to riches and the puppets who dance as the fools pull their strings.

Who hears the wisdom on the wind and in the river? Who hears laughter in the croaking of the toad? Who can hear the sobbing of God in the mewl of the fading child?

To hear this great Voice while still clutching to trinkets causes madness. For one cannot reckon the fear of clutching with the freedom of God. These two lives cannot be lived in the same body.

And so it is those that have let go of the trinkets, have fallen and found soft Earth beneath them, been blanketed by the sky and sheltered by the trees that hear God’s voice. When the brave leave chaos behind and return to the wilds, when they bathe themselves in the waters of their Mother’s womb and are warmed by the fire of the sun, then are they made ready to hear the Voice which is at once enormous and silent. The body must be freed to embrace the simplicity of the Voice; otherwise the Voice is confused with the noise of the machinery of human chaos.

So fall. Fall and know the Earth is soft. Fall and trust your descent will be graceful. Fall from the grime we have manufactured and be received into the green living body of God.

I have fallen many times but it was only when I stopped clawing my way up again that I could rest. Resting allowed me to dream. Dreaming set free my soul. My soul embraced the living Earth and the enormity of God and then I could never leave.

In this time in our human history when our greatest institutions of learning produce marionettes for the trickster, when the art of the devout is locked in the cathedrals basement, when freedom is confined to democracy, then we must search for wisdom under the rock and under the bridges of our cities.

I will wholly trust this voice of God, this whispering Earth, and plunge eagerly to her yielding body.

The Wild Garden

Beauty is solely Divine Light and Divine Light is present in all of life. There is nothing that is without beauty, no one who is less than beautiful. Splendour radiates from the grandest and the smallest of creatures. Beauty shines from the rotting tree and from the blooming flower.

As we methodically destroy the natural beauty around us is it any wonder that we have produced such a narrow margin of what we endure as beautiful?

How can it be up to us to decide what is beautiful; is it not our task, instead, to discover the beauty present in everything around us?

A flower can be no more beautiful for our attempts to make the colour of its petals more vibrant. When we try to make the natural more beautiful we constrain the very thing we seek to expand upon. We don’t extinguish the Divine Light of beauty within, that is not possible. We do, however, throw a synthetic cloak over the splendour of this radiance. What we manufacture is not real and holds no truth.

We have constructed a society of falsehoods; replacing forests with skyscrapers, rivers with pipelines, mountains with roads. We place no value on beauty that we believe we cannot profit from. We do the same with our bodies; replacing breasts with silicone, muscles with implants, desire with medication.

The very things that make a woman beautiful; the silver lines on her belly that are testimony to the life she carried, the girth of her hips that sway erotically when she dances, the softness of her lap where you lay your head and slept – all these we replace, erase and shrink from.

What is it we fear?

Corporate culture fears that if we are not obsessing over various parts of our bodies, maintaining a weed-free lawn, driving a shinier car, we might turn our attention to the establishment and dismantle the machine.

However, Corporations could not exist if we weren’t willing participants in our own domination.

What is it we fear?

We fear our own authority and vulnerability. If we begin to see the beauty in all things, we begin to see the beauty within ourselves. With this INsight we become the true Master-piece. If I acknowledge the innate beauty in all my relations, then I acknowledge the beauty in you and we become – equal – each the authority of our own nature.

We join with all of nature; not separate, not distinct, vulnerable to the moods of this Earth and the seasons of our life. We come to understand that we need each other; must be at once the giver and the receiver, the healer and the wounded. We must surrender and have faith that there will be soft places and warm bodies to nurture us and we must be this for others.

Authority and vulnerability are fearless positions we place ourselves in so that we may thrive in the garden of our Spirit and be free, throwing off the manufactured cloak that seeks to snuff out our Divine Light. We come to remember the blessing of beauty and can no longer destroy that which we love, that which we exalt.

When we remember the Light of the Divine within us, we will know the miracle of our humanity. We will behold the growth of our forests, taste the purity of our waters, and respect the boundaries of our wild sisters and brothers.

We will clean up our own mess.

Such is this love

I went out into the rain; my arms and shoulders bare, no shoes on my feet. It poured down hard and cold, immediately my skin responded; a thousand shocked and tiny hairs bristled protectively.

Crouching on the lawn, I imagined I was a tiny creature; folded in upon myself, hunkered down on the forest floor patiently waiting for the downpour to ease.

Every natural instinct within me wanted to contract against the cold; constrict my body to its smallest form, shielding myself from the relentless rain.

Then slowly I began to focus on my breath; inhaling submission and exhaling acceptance. Relaxing each muscle; unclenching my hands, my belly, softening my jaw, I unfolded and my body blossomed into the wet and the cold.

I prayed, “Thank you for this rain. Thank you for this Earth. Thank you for this life.” over and over, water dripping from my eyelashes and trailing down my neck. I was filled with ecstasy; drunk with love for all Creation. And the activity of my ecstasy was still but for my swelling heart.

Succumbing to the rain I lifted my face in adoration, threw open my arms, exposed my naked soul to the tears running from my Divine Lovers eyes. Sacred vulnerability demands no rational thought. I heard my Lover laugh with joy that I should abandon all measure of sanity to receive this passion, and eagerly offer my body in return.

Such is this love.

The Shadow of God

Why should God be any less complex than we are? Why do we cling to foolish duality?

It is God who created the rock and placed it in our path so that we stumble. It is God who moves the clouds over the sun so that the light is blocked from us. The wolf that takes down your cattle is also a masterpiece of God.

We desperately seek to manoeuvre around the obstacles that trip us, bring darkness upon us and threaten our livelihood. In our scramble for safe ground we become the destruction we run from. When we try to climb a mountain without falling backward we rip from its roots the bush we grasp for to pull us onward one more step.

The bush weeps too as it dies and never realizes its fullness.

Just as God created the crystal clear waters that surge down the winding river, so too did God create the pool of stagnate mud in which your foot becomes mired.

All of creation is a blessing and always comes from love. It is us who divides creation into good and evil, worthy and unworthy, loved and hated. God is the totality, the fullness and the sum of what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch on this Earth, all that comes from and lives in Nature.

Yet we rush to the warmth and shrink from the cold.

We welcome the dog into our homes and slaughter the cow.

What is worthy and unworthy is judged in the mind, not in the heart. Worthiness is always what pleases us, as though we are simply baby birds in the nest, requiring our sustenance to be placed by Mother in our gaping mouths. But we will eventually starve if we resist taking flight.

I have found God in the darkness. I have found God in the shadows, in my shadow; the darkness of my soul. I have felt God’s touch in the pain from my scrapped knee and the sting of salt upon my wound.

Indeed God did not become real to me until I found God in my darkest nights. A God that awaits me in the light could not be conceived of in my heart because my heart also beat in my most wretched moments.

If I could still breathe while sobbing then God must also be there. The breath behind my song is the same breath behind my wailing. We do no justice to God when we assign God solely to that which brings us pleasure and causes us happiness.

I retreated into the closet of my bedroom, shut the door and lay on the tiny expanse of floor. I curled up into myself and hugged my knees to my body. I sought the safety of darkness and confinement and embraced the blackness within my heart.

All hurts and wrongs, all injury and assault, that had been done to me and that I had done to others, visited me there. They were relentless in their mockery and cruel in their accusations.

And for 100 nights I endured them, the closet both my haven and my prison, until they became familiar to me, less demonic and more tiresome. Then in my slumber another voice was heard, barely a whisper that my ears reached for.

The voice that came to me in the night had arms that embraced me and eyes that wept with mine and a heart brave enough to withstand my rage and misery.

This Divine Lover did not wait for me in the light, nor did my Lover shine a light for me to see. My God’s voice was carried on the stale air in the closet, my God’s arms the very blackness that enfolded me, and my God’s tears the sweat from my own brow.

I did not need to kneel and bow my head at an altar to honour this God, for it was honour enough to strip myself of all adornment and lay naked and exposed.

Had I died in that closet God would have held me while I did and then carried me heart and soul to paradise. Had I never seen the Sun my Lover would have wept with me all those long nights and into eternity.

This is the true miracle of God. The blessing of life is passionately embraced when we bow to the complexity of God and our own souls.

How magnificent it all becomes; the rock, the mud and the predator when we endure the closet, submit to darkness, not because we are brave but because we have not the strength to go on.

When we open to the cold that is also our Lovers breath and hearken to the lullaby that sings to us in the darkness then we truly embrace the complexity of our glorious Soul and discover within us the enormity of God.

Radical Acts of the Silent Non-Conformist

In our “evolution” as a human species we have forgotten two profound urges that exist within the human soul; humility and sacrifice.

To be humble is to embrace the laughter and the ridicule of others as you act upon the voice of Spirit that guides you along your path.

Sacrifice is to give freely that which another needs. To live in the mystery that lay between the have and the have-not, and to be grateful for the blessing of love you can shower upon others.

Humility and sacrifice are the soul’s truest expression of the instincts that make us human and lead to the fullness of living and enacting the purpose of our existence – to be stewards to all of our relations.

Conformity is our greatest enemy at this time because conformity demands that we live within the constructs of a materially driven world. To conform requires that we abandon our true nature – the wild act of flourishing in the natural world – and instead seek approval of the masses designed to make us smaller than we were ever meant to be. We rein in our passions and channel our energy into being the tamed consumer for the insignificant, controlling business of banal pleasure.

We shun sacrifice but fail to see the profound sacrifices made by our relations in the natural world to support our lust for conformity.

Consider what is required for the creature whose massive life is restricted to the cold metallic counter of the scientist, the beauty-engineer, testing agonizing chemicals upon innocent eyes so that we might mask our faces.

Consider the tree that existed long before we were even aware of the forest, that falls so we can live in houses so large that we lose our Spirits in the many empty rooms supported by walls that separate us.

Consider the bloating body of the child lying under the hot sun weakly grasping for the shrunken breast of its mother.

This is what conformity demands of us; that we pay the price of turning from our own souls, ignore the whisper of compassion, and glorify our lust and greed. Glorify these through entertainment we call “Reality”, through uselessly stuffing our face with riches that never fill the void within us, through denying the yearning of our strong hands to hold the hand of one who is reaching.

We deny the need for sacrifice yet demand it of every other living creature on our Mother Earth.

Can you throw away the trappings of servitude and seek the peace that awaits you in the soft weeping of a world we are recklessly and perversely violating? Can you sacrifice your material desires and replace these with the truest desire of your own soul – to be at one with our perfect Earth and with yourself by silently singing the poetry of your soothing love?

Can you make these sacrifices and then forget them, requiring not even your own praise?

Humility is the gift given to us; a simple shining pebble nestled within our heart, which fosters the expression of our greatest love in the most hidden of places, away from the eyes and the approval of others. Humility breaks free from conformity so that we might live a life of “rightness” with God. Humility allows us to walk upon the body of our Mother gently and with reverence unashamed but without pride.

I know pride, have been ruled by it and selfishly indulged the lies of my ego by contorting my body into misshapen poses most pleasing to the world. I have withheld that which I know another requires because of false esteem that seduced me into believing I was more worthy and that giving made me weak.

In remembering humility I am being freed to return to the grace of my soul and to use my body as the landscape through which my nature is liberated.

The humility I am remembering challenges all modern notions of freedom of expression, beauty, or reward. Freed expression is the song of love, beauty is the pebble and not the cut diamond and reward is living in oneness with my God and my Mother Earth.

I bow my head to acknowledge the greatness of All My Relations. I am remembering that each act of kindness I perform is as natural as breathing. Requiring reward for breathing would result in physical death; requiring reward for kindness results in death of the spirit. Natural instincts need only the blessing of life in order to thrive.

Walking this path which is placed before me is no great act and requires no self-aggrandisement, just as a wolf requires no applause for the giving of its song to the moon.

When we are humbled by each sacrifice we make we are freed from the shallow waters of conformity and dive, instead, into the depth of our tremendous soul.

Sacrifice and humility cannot exist along-side the mediocrity of fortune, material abundance and socially constructed ideals of perfection. Sacrifice and humility require the tremendous act of silence and of fierce submission to the ancient and primal call of our Soul.

Restrain the Insane Lest Chaos Reign

The controlling, “power-over”, dominance of man-made religions permeates all areas of our society. We recreate this religion in all constructs of our lives – in the hierarchies we adhere to, in the worship of trinkets – money being yet another external source of power, in our institutions and corporations. Although we do not call it religion and we have all but erased any reference to God, we replicate the essence of its dogma at every turn. We seek to control and dominate through instilling fear of the wrath of poverty, illness and loneliness. Through fear we are led to uphold a system into which we are indoctrinated, cursed with never being enough; never pretty, rich or thin enough. We pray for perfection and purification with our wallets and seek to escape the evil of our true nature. We deny our bodies with our obsessive need to sculpt them.

And this permeates our mental health systems as well. Any behaviour deemed as “out of control” must be controlled with medications, therapies and, if need be, restraints.

We seek to dwarf and eradicate “illusions” of grandeur and delusional creativity. These make us uncomfortable and threaten our fragile structures. These people, these “mentally ill”, do not conform to, nor do they reflect, our collective external reality.

Those who are marked as mentally ill rally against the norm; they hear voices others cannot hear, see images others cannot see. They are messengers whom we shoot with mind-numbing drugs so that we might kill the message.

The mentally ill must be restrained lest chaos reigns; chaos that results in unbridled expression.

The dull comfort of an orderly world; one in which we can count on wars, corporate greed, earth-destroying machinery, famine and soul wrenching cruelty is chosen because of its predictability. We can rely on those activities of materialism and say we are against them while we continue to sculpt our bodies, silence our minds with entertainment that relishes that which we say appals us, and bend our knees to the will of the economy and the affluent that hold its reins.

And so I wonder; would the “depressed” contemplate and plot their own escape from overwhelming sadness if they could be held and validated – assured that their tears make sense in a world where inflicting pain on a massive scale is sanctioned?

Would the “bi-polar” require medications that feed the gluttony of the pharmaceuticals if space was cleared for the expression of immense joy and expansive energy; if they had partners that freed themselves from the chains of equilibrium and danced with them in the bedlam?

Would the “schizophrenic” need to scream so loudly if they were heard?

What if the mentally ill are the barometer of a world that is truly ill, sick to the point of collapse, deaf to the collective soul that whispers to us but is unheard through the reckless din we have created?

What if God is truly among us now and those that know this, feel this presence are overcome with God’s sorrow, joy and anger? And so they give voice to God in a hundred ways that threaten to break through the haze we so desperately need in order to maintain this religion we adhere to and the idols we have constructed to worship at.

I walk among the mentally ill, know the power of a label that seeks to invalidate each thought I have, each vision I share.

Yet it is amidst the chaos of my own mind where I hear the voice of my soul, taste the tears of truth and sing the madness of compassion – none of which are mine, but are expressions of Divine Love; the insanity of God.

I stand with those who cannot live within the house of conformity and so exist outside of it looking in. Yet I have also made my home within that house and collapsed into the seductive breast of compliance. And I have learned that within it, I cannot breathe and colours are dull and food is tasteless.

As madness weaves around me and my brothers and sisters, I must embrace that which God gives me. Not ‘must’ as in commands but ‘must’ as in my organic nature. Just as I ‘must’ eat in order to live, I must live in the untamed world so that I might know life.

This religion and the lunacy of its’ materially-driven clergy is rotting, just as the walls of the insane asylums that once held the wild ones have collapsed, and the shiny falsehoods preached to the masses are beginning to be revealed for what they are.

And it is on the breath, in the sorrow and through the ecstasy of those irrational ones; those that live on the streets, in the darkness of their homes, and in the prisons of the terrified dictator, that God’s love and desire can be found – wrapped in the skin of the wounded.