Nature is Light Made Flesh

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iris

 

ten years ago…

It’s a brilliant sunny day in San Francisco. My boyfriend and I are, very slowly, making our way through the community garden near Fort Mason. It’s a really wonderful place because the people gardening there seem to love what they cultivate. You can feel it in the air. Flowers seem to flourish here. It could be the weather, too, and I can see the care with which each person is tending their patch.

We’ve wound our way through most of the garden, and as we come into the northwestern corner, just before we make our way up the terraced hillside to the gate to leave, I see a flower right before my eyes. Something in this flower draws me in. It’s the colors. It’s the light. And, it’s something more.

My eyes completely take this flower in. I don’t know what kind of flower it is, but it is tall and narrow in shape, and along the height of it it moves from deep purple, to indigo blue, to green, to yellow. The color flows in and out with no perceptible shift from one to the next.

In what is probably not more than a second of looking, I am filled with a profound sense of something that I have no words for. Absolutely no words. But, I am filled with it. My heart…my whole body is filled with it. A space even bigger than my body is filled with it. This space encompasses this flower. For a length of time that is outside of time, I am enveloped in something I have no words for, something that literally causes me to go speechless. Tears are streaming from my eyes.

The beauty of this flower as it moves from purple through to yellow has opened me to the wordless place, and I stand still, transfixed, transported, transformed. In this moment beyond moments, in this community garden filled with the most commonplace happenings of daily life, I come to know something profoundly beyond what my eyes normally take in.

My boyfriend takes my hand and asks me, “What’s wrong, Honey?” He sees my tears. He sees that I am not moving, transfixed in front of what looks like just another flower. I cannot speak. I try, but I am speechless. He puts his arm around me, and his touch slowly brings me back to the garden, to standing there with him.

The flower still looks extraordinary to me, but I am no longer transfixed nor speechless. I begin to try to tell him what I experienced, but again there are no words. Everything I say just sounds ordinary. “It is so beautiful. Look at the colors; how the gradually move from purple, to indigo, to blue, to green, to yellow. It is so incredibly beautiful.” Yet inside, the experience I am trying to relate is so alive with fire, with light, with life. The words cannot capture the feeling, but they do carry some of it because it is alive.

 

Back to now, ten years later…

In looking back, I see how my relationship with life changed, my relationship with flowers changed, my ability to ‘see’ changed.

The flower was filled with light, with a fire of radiance, a fire of light in every cell.

That experience stayed with me for a bit, and then it began to recede in memory…until now. I remember trying to understand what had happened. I tried to make sense of it. But, I don’t think that is necessary, even if it is what we tend to do. I feel experiences like this come when they come. I see now that all the while something was deepening in me: a relationship with beauty, with light, with immanence.

In that moment, I felt love. I felt the light of being streaming through me, streaming through the flower. In that moment, I cannot say what I was or who I was. The woman. The flower. The light. The fire. The love.

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
in which you see all forms intensified.
(Out in the Open, you would be denied
your self, would disappear into that vastness.)
Space reaches from us and construes the world:
to know a tree, in its true element,
throw inner space around it, from that pure
abundance in you. Surround it with restraint.
It has no limits. Not till it is held
in your renouncing is it truly there.

Rainer Maria Rilke, translation by Stephen Mitchell, by way of my friend Barbara

 

To know this, in its true element, throw inner space around it…from that pure abundance, pure love, pure beauty [with]in you.

Why do I share this story with you? We are all this. This love. This light. This fire. This space. We are this force. We are this Nature.

Nature is Light made flesh.

Becoming aware that we are this is the necessary work of our time.

Becoming a Force of Nature is waking up to the divinity, the holiness of your own flesh, blood, and bones. To see this light within you, to see your own divine, sacred Self radiating and pulsing with life, and to see it in all of life. It is waking up to your body’s intelligence, and to your own beautiful self worth.

I’d love to have you join me for this summer course of awakening to the force of nature that you already are. We begin June 9th.

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Radiance

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PeonyDarkCenterBaFoN

 

The other day…

I was feeling frustrated.

I’ve been feeling so much creativity inside, like there’s this impulse – so strong – to create. The impulse was like a river running – so strong and vital. I’ve got a few things I’m working on, so it’s not like I’m not creating. I am. Yet, I’ve always had this thought that somehow I have to express all of what I feel into the world.

It’s sort of a funny thing how I’ve thought this. I don’t know if you can relate. I can remember feeling this way as a child – that I could feel and sense and see so much that isn’t part of this world that we see, yet even though I really wanted to share what I saw with others, it was hard to describe to anyone in words. Certainly, few adults seemed to understand.

 

When I was young,

I would sit under the weeping willow tree in the back yard, whose branches swooped almost down to the ground. I felt like I was invisible within her branches. I would sit there on this little bench that ran along the fence and just feel how alive everything around me was. I felt at home there. I didn’t need to explain to the weeping willow what I saw and could sense – I knew she could sense me.

The frustration I felt the other day, I hadn’t felt for a long time. Feeling it took me back to those years as a child when I felt like I had to get what is inside out there into the world. And, that felt impossible. To feel this again was like all of this that I felt inside had to come into the world somehow through my voice, up and out of my body through my mouth and my hands and my ideas. It felt frustrating.

I wrote and shared this:

Maybe we can never really fully express the depth and breadth of the Soul into this material world. It feels like trying to open a firehose through a kitchen faucet. Such immensity. Such fullness. So many layers beyond what is evident in this world of matter. Simplicity seems to be key. Simple. open, honest expression that pulses with the vibrancy of Soul.

The words came from feeling like the only way it could all come out is if I keep it simple…like the energy itself would have room then.

 

The very next day…

I was at dance and an image flashed across the screen in my mind. It was an image of me dancing, and all of this vibrancy and intensity and expression was radiating out of me in a complete infinite sphere, meaning it was 360 degrees around in every direction.

And then it dawned on me. (Thank goodness, because the relief was huge.)

Of course.

 

All of this energy isn’t ‘inside of me’, something I’ve thought for so long as an adult. It is me. It is radiating. I don’t have to try to get it out of me and into the world. It is in me. It is in the world. It is the world. It is me. There is no separation.

 

It was such a beautiful image and such a clear insight. As I danced, I just felt it, or me, radiating. It was as if the energy was coming into me, but also then radiating back out into ‘the world’ or whatever that really is. I could, and can, feel this pulsing center into which, and out of which, life seems to radiate.

Talk about freedom. Suddenly, I felt no more attempting to force or control or wish to do something with this energy…what I can feel is simply the life force that is what I think of as me. And, I had to laugh. It was really quite funny what I’d been making up in my mind about what I had to DO with it all.

We are simply this vitality. It is always moving. Trying to DO something is really trying to control it. It knows how to move. It just moves.

 

It radiates. You radiate. Have you ever had someone tell you that? That you look radiant? Yes, there you go.

Radiance.

Come to think of it, that beautiful weeping willow was radiant, too.

 

What if you are creativity?

What if that is what you are, creation pulsing with creativity?

What if it takes NO effort at all?

What if your life force knows how to flow, and that who you really are longs to radiate?

 

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Sexual Creature

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If you could picture your intuition as a person, what would he or she look like? If you sat down together for dinner, what is the first thing he or she would tell you? ***

First Buds, by John-Morgan

What would she look like?

She is bold.

She is bright and beautiful.

She is alive with light and vibrancy.

She pulses with life force, the same force that pushes seed to flower, that causes the gray gnarled bark to erupt with soft petals of blossom, that speaks fire when the circumstances require it.

She stands completely in her nature, without apology.

What does she say?

” You are a sexual creature.

Your creativity and sexuality are inextricably intertwined.

This sexual vibrant creative energy has nothing to do with men. Nothing.

It is completely about the body and the divine.

The more you disconnect from the projection of this sexual, creative power onto men, the more you will know the experience of your life force solely unto yourself.

Knowing this solely unto yourself frees you to be you in all your radiance.

Then, and only then, can you be in

right relationship

with men, with women, with all of life.

Creatively.

Sexually.

Lovingly.”

Then she says,

“I’m not your intuition. I am you.”

*** question posed by Susan Piver as part of the Trust30 writing challenge.

First Buds by John-Morgan licensed under CC2.0

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Love of Woman

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“…this is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love.” ~David Whyte

I want to write about love.

Between women.

Love between women that was never part of the world I grew up in.

Love between women that defies the (il)logic of patriarchy.

Love that is outside the acceptable norm of patriarchal society.

This love between me and woman has been a long time coming.

To love woman in this way goes against unspoken rules.

It pushes up against learned fears.

And it compels me to belly-up to the place of trust, where the tenderness of past hurts reveals its pink flesh.

This love is far beyond simply promising not to put other women down.

This love is far beyond knowing that supporting another woman does not diminish me.

This love is more simple than all of these thinking things.

This love comes from the place deep within my body that is the radiance of the living, breathing essence of the sacred, divine feminine.

To love woman is to know the purity of the place made ready for new life, whether or not this place ever produces new life.

It has taken me a long time to learn to love woman – in myself, in others, and in its most essential form, the sacred, divine feminine.

::

This post is in response to The Summer of Love Invitational, where the lovely Mahala Mazerov has invited bloggers to write about loving kindness.

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