Noble Awakening
I woke up in a Noble state of mind. Do you ever get that Eureka feeling, as if you’ve discovered an Archimedean principle or the very wheel itself?! Quite preposterously, I shot up in bed and I felt like I had unearthed the root problem which causes the imbalance of all beings and it came with a solution, which could apply to all (older/wiser/more sedate) folks who are ready to walk the walk of peace and talk the talk of stillness.
by Emily Kencairn of Apiary Studio
It was only the four Noble Truths and their Eight-Fold curative Path that had recurred to me over-night.
I had fallen asleep to the question: what is love?
If I struggle with the Narrow Road and the Heart of Jesus, I fell easily into a temperate step upon the Taoist Way. I pranced out of bed happy to have remembered an old familiar walk I used to take. It felt a bit like laying out a spread of obvious cards for stepping-stones. In the mirror I found myself on a tranquil mat.
Wary of the Super-Chilled
I have a neighbour who calls her deceased husband, "her god". At first it sounded blasphemous, then I dismissed it as the utterance of a grieving widow, eventually she became known to the neighbourhood as the woman off her rocker. We pitied her until she became annoying with her orations on love is all you need.
She kept on crossing my path, and whenever we fell into conversation we more or less saw eye to eye on many spiritual observations. We deplored the state of the world, but recognised in eachother a faith which is rare and precisely not a watered down doctrine, but something gleaned by life-experience.
Too good to be true
After each encounter, however, once back home, as time wore on and my own intention to remain fast in a positive attitude, avoiding false talk, choosing only peaceful ways, and attending to detail with an inquisitive mind, (i.e. my loving kindness to myself fell flat), I would find her pretty freaky again, with her indefatigable good cheer.
It would then feel like she had adopted a near-evangelical survival mode to make life remotely beareable. Her husband and she had worked all their adult lives in a flower shop and shared a tiny two room flat out back, where they had to accommodate two children besides. They were eachother's constant company when he was suddenly ripped out of her life, in her early fifties.
Her insistence that he is not "dead" and always with her is one I never took too literally (it doesn't fit in my philosophy on life and death) and I have worried for her that her root trust in life itself was actually so feeble that she needed to delude herself. For a while I considered - like the rest of us - that she had constructed little more than a delusion, supported by the shrine to her husband (i.e. the house full of honorary memorabilia). Anywhich way, however, by now, her modus vivendi has come to lead a life of its own, much like any religion, perhaps; and if feels to me that she is, notwithstanding whatever delusion, connected to something larger by lines of love.
Life is what you make it
What you believe becomes your reality. Why could that reality not be the sense of God's presence?
Perhaps, this is the connection religion always aims to achieve: tying us back to a (Logos) Source beyond suffering, uncontaminated by desire and ignorance (the Fallen State).
Perhaps, this woman in question has not quite yet stepped into the vita activa (a pro-active life that saves souls by elevating their mundane condition) as the Christian Teacher proposed and her claim to love is more Zen-Buddhist, in the sense that it means no harm, wishes to maintain balance, and is therefore compassionate. Still, keeping oneself to oneself (in dialogue with God) is a great thing to be getting on with in our over-crowded, cacophonous world, if you ask me.
This (whatever it is? Anyone know?) reminded Kerem Colakoglu on Unsplash of the series "Lost" (not sure why, but I missed a couple of seasons and followed most of the binge watch of my son during the washing up). It instantly reminds me of the dharma wheel connoting the eight-fold path.
Difficult to tell, and what do I know, but perhaps this overly positive woman had her husband ripped away in order to learn to paint the shadows?
I don't know what the picture is of, but seems a precarious, human-built bridge over the enormity and power of ocean--like a wind or big wave would take out any human brave enough to venture into the sacred geometry, if the bigger so chose.
I've taken this comment with me into the night, to let your eagle wisdom do its magic. I stake out in my camouflage tent, wobbling in the trees (can't help that wobble, I'm bound to suck at anything to do with tents), with my (night-vision) binoculars on you, after I've put my rabbit to crouch in the burrow of Steemit.
I recognise in you a deft shadow-fighter, and of the manichaen kind: meeting darkness with light, not to flood it invisible but to colour it in and point: gottcha!
There the shadow then stands. Often with a snarl, but that's okay: snarling costs a lot of energy and our kind of observation refreshes nothing. So keep glaring at us, I say!
But now you mention "bridge".... I was going to ask: have you heard anything on when we are going to get the first proper pillars up? Hmmm.... Now you speak of frothing oceans, though, I ask: are we MAD? (No, not ask, this is a noun phrase with the pragmatic function of expressing indignation.)
Let us indeed not pull our gods out of proportion! And await a little while amore (oh, amore amore) for the next ark.
P.S. Taking you on my next glaring mission! Seen the way you can hold a gaze nice and steady: they forget they even have teeth.
I like being seen with eagle wisdom and as a shadow-fighter :) Yes, to bring a light in, but not to blind, still I must feel my way around the dark.
Not sure on the pillars, but we all know how the tower of Babel turned out, once we're sure, standing above it, we're knocked down.
I'm going to give it my best guess. It is a recreational swimming pier built in a place with Tourists and no sandy Beaches. It has 2 boarding Ladders and is surrounded by floating Platforms and possibly Shark netting marking a swimming area.
Well, that sure takes the magic out of the wheel! Tourists you say? Ladders, okay, always handy. Sharks....hmmm let's take that netting away. Sorry, allergic to tourists after a summer in my own city flooded with them in flipflops and hideous shorts and too many selfie-sticks. I'm considering starting a campaign next summer to promote appropriate museum-wear. Then again, that might lead to socks in sandals....
(And that wheel in the wheel? I now notice, since you spotted the ladders and I zoom in. Might it open a trap-door in the bottom of that sea-bed, on extra sunny days when overcrowding of the pier threatens? I rub my hands in glee. Or have I watched too many - old- Bond films?)
Well if you spot a white 1977 Lotus Esprit in the neighborhood of that pier you may be on to something. (Roger included of course)
Over the years I've seen many such strange Piers, erected by businessmen with more money than sense in the hopes of attracting more business for their Hotels. In the end, the Ocean always wins and takes out the Pier.
Great news that Oceanic victory! The wheel of dharma will keep turning with or without it; only less clanking without tourists.
(P.s. nothing personal against Saint Roger but of course as OO7, I give him the pier as it goes down....)
Yes!!! I get that feeling and I want to appreciate it and absorb it and bathe in it, but inevitably I lose that feeling. Now whenever that feeling comes - if I am conscious of my past lessons I try to appreciate it in the moment and then let it go. I savor that it will be gone so that I can receive the next. I am letting go of wanting the next feeling to come so that I can appreciate it when it arrives.
I think you are right... your neighbor is onto something. She found an idea that she can hold dear to herself and place her love onto. I like your thought process. If we are too quick to judge someone we may lose out on an opportunity to find joy and love in appreciating them for who they are. Thanks for sharing this story :)