back yard

 From My Back Yard
 
Not too long ago, there was a period of time during which I simply and utterly could not relate to the ever present cultural urgency of doing and having that had permeated my life.  The pace of the sky and the air and of all the beautiful nature around me where I live matched the speed of my inner dimension of breathing and peace and awareness.  Sitting on the back porch doing nothing was really okay! I did not feel the need to prove or defend anything; just naturally existing in a feeling of harmony.

There were bills to pay and they were, as work happened and it does, all within an original matrix of time and space that demands nothing.  Life loves to live and living became a suspended moment of breath, feeling, sensing and opening all 32.7 trillion cells in my body to an intimate now. Being literally at peace with doing nothing oddly fulfilled a deep desire that I had transforming a million moments of waiting to an eternal space of being.

After some months of resting I began to notice a rising of several impulses. First, that within that space of being I sensed something missing and second, I simultaneously sensed something wanting or longing. It was not urgent, but it was a deep and profound yearning to act from this space. With care, of course, came first. Not my care, but the care of life loving itself into existence. Then came this recognition of dedicating the merit of the practices I take refuge in daily to others; all others, every single one. I know I did not invent this, yet the rising of it naturally as life and love itself seemed obvious.

Do I have to save children in India? Dolphins in Hawaii? Women in Western Europe? I thought so for a very long time. But, in the matrix of being, the connection between all living beings seems an intimate and obvious realization. I could close my eyes and feel the ripples of prayers from cloistered practitioners affecting the big mind of me and you. Doesn’t the love that I feel reach the whales and the birds too?  Where is my sphere of influence anyway? Is it here in my community or within a larger whole? Both?

Since there is no striving to influence, but the yearning to become from a place of being, then the action rises in every moment, no matter what. This becoming feels like passion and curiosity infinitely entwined guaranteeing, as it were, a warm glow in my heart. One project dissolves and another evolves and the knowing that what needs to express will, no matter.

“Wisdom is knowing I am nothing,
Love is knowing I am everything,
and between the two my life moves.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj
 
The moment to moment expression of life is at this intersection of love and wisdom, everything and nothing. I am empty and I am full; I am feminine and masculine; I am, we are, an individualized expression of love and That within which this movement occurs. Here, there is no doubt, no seeking, and no fear. Yet, this ‘everything’ has a spectrum from the beauty to the beast and the beingness that I Am is available for both.  Herein lies the movement to create harmony and health and beauty and connection! Here, here, in here, is born the movement  to reach out indiscriminately and unattached, from my back yard.