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.

The Gift of Birth

Thank God you were born;
at the perfect time, in the perfect form.
You brought the sunshine into our family,
you were the warm spot in the heart of our tribe.

Thank God you were born;
so much beauty in your tiny face.
Looking into your innocent depths,
I wanted to be
a better me.

Thank Goddess for you;
landing in amongst this small circle of souls,
each of us made more bright
by your arrival.

Thank Spirit for your Spirit,
joining me on this journey,
in this life,
to be lost together and to find each other.

There is more to us then this blood we share,
more then common memories and missing pieces.
There are the thousand shared yesterdays,
on pieces of this earth
that we have yet to revisit today.

Pebbles; A Mighty Life

It has been a year since Pebbles died. At times I miss her as though it was yesterday. The pain is gone – or nearly so – but the space she left hasn’t filled yet.

Perhaps it never will.

I’m okay with that.

She was my best friend and we knew each other without limitations on love. There were no expectations, no conditions – every time we were together there was only play, tenderness and deep familiarity; an irreplaceable bond.

I remember holding her those last days. She was so tiny and fragile. She seemed confused much of the time. Embracing her close to my heart was like holding a tiny bird. I knew it was time for her to go. The knowing crept up on me like a soft shadow; I felt it coming long before it enveloped me. The last time I took her to the beach she didn’t struggle to be released from my arms, from the blanket I wrapped her in. She just cuddled close to me and stared out at the water, breathing deeply the salt air.

She knew it was time to go.

The day she died I spent seeing clients; one after the other while she rested in the house. The Vet came to check in on her and when she saw her, stumbling as she walked, she told me it was time. Strangely I was in a small way relieved, both Pebbles and I having been released from enduring a long goodbye, one where I would hold on more fiercely than she.

She lay in my arms while the sedative was given. Her sleep came fast and deepened as I lay her on her pillows. I stroked her and whispered to her words that only she and I will ever know.

Then she was gone; her mighty life on this earth over, her tasks here complete. I placed a wren’s wing between her tiny paws and kissed her a final time.

I cried softly as I stroked her, reluctant to allow the Vet to wrap her and take her away.

I cried more loudly when she did.

I still sense Pebbles’ presence at times. She romps through grass too tall for her to see over; running to me, ears perked and eye’s bright. She always fades away before she reaches me.

My heart always aches a little at these times.

I’m okay with that.

Elation

In this moment there could be a no more perfect place
for me to be, just be.
Sun rising warm on my face,
eagle perched in a nearby tree,
water in constant motion, now retreating from the shore.

In this moment there could be a no more perfect me;
gentle heart and calm mind,
listening to the whispers of this Earth,
hopeful, daring,
daring to hope.

How do I gather these moments within me?
Store them in my Soul
so that they arise, like this sun,
when I cannot see the Light?

Ravens surround me and Morrigan calls,
I hear her voice in the tide.
She is not angry, she does not scream,
even as she opens her cloak to me.

O Goddess of this Earth, of this Universe
O Goddess of this heart, of this breath;
Rise up from this sacred place
where all your treasures await.

Rise up fierce and gentle Mother;
sing to me the Eagles song,
lift me up on wings of gold.
Carry me, carry me.

Sitting on this beach in this moment
I could believe that God constructed this place
just for me.
I could believe that this was God’s way
of celebrating my birth.

That when I plunged head first
into this life; grasping for light,
strong heart in plump body,
God was so moved that this place
sprung up from His own elation,
knowing I would sit here one day
and appreciate His gift to me.

I believe that for all of us;
each new life an elated creation.
Like the seal that peaks its head from the waters,
we come from deep places.
But always we surface, always arise
to be carried most gently to shore.

Forever

I went to the river and the river was dry.
I walked the forest and the forest was brittle.
I hiked the earth and the earth was hard.
I shrieked for the end of all things.

I came to a snake; she had shed her skin.
She was near death, under the hot sun.
The earth cracked and split; within was a small baby.
I held her and she started to cry.

Her tears fell onto the earth and spread
to the rivers and forests; everything became soft.
My blood began to run again; I was growing young again
and old at the same time.