Last night, on my deck I watched the eclipse of the moon. Light changed to darkness, then changed to light. From that darkness came light. It felt like a renewal for my soul...
I had a fire ceremony where I wrote on 22 yellow stickies, resentments, angers, hurts, and many of the hurts I've inflicted on those I love, and those I didn't love. As I burned them in my grill, the clouds briefly cleared and I could see the moon was totally eclipsed. The white smoke quietly and gently spiraled into the sky, taking with it many of my hurts, resentments, and anger. I felt that warm feeling in my solar plexus. Tears welled from my eyes, washing my cloudy vision away and leaving the clarity of pure love in my soul. It was cathartic. I loved the experience. I did good for me... and those I love. I'm beginning to understand that to change the world, we must change ourselves first.
I think to some, "Source" seems like darkness. Why? Because none of our senses can perceive it. Some call Source "light," because the less we obstruct it, the more radiant we are. It seems to me that the gateway to all understanding is that we have to remain in the darkness of not knowing, until we accept the light of knowing.
In my poem "Changes" I wrote this -
We exist together,
I had a fire ceremony where I wrote on 22 yellow stickies, resentments, angers, hurts, and many of the hurts I've inflicted on those I love, and those I didn't love. As I burned them in my grill, the clouds briefly cleared and I could see the moon was totally eclipsed. The white smoke quietly and gently spiraled into the sky, taking with it many of my hurts, resentments, and anger. I felt that warm feeling in my solar plexus. Tears welled from my eyes, washing my cloudy vision away and leaving the clarity of pure love in my soul. It was cathartic. I loved the experience. I did good for me... and those I love. I'm beginning to understand that to change the world, we must change ourselves first.
I think to some, "Source" seems like darkness. Why? Because none of our senses can perceive it. Some call Source "light," because the less we obstruct it, the more radiant we are. It seems to me that the gateway to all understanding is that we have to remain in the darkness of not knowing, until we accept the light of knowing.
In my poem "Changes" I wrote this -
We exist together,
and now I know it is.
I am the Light and I am the Darkness,
and of these things are me.
I love the warm Light,
and I love the cold Darkness.
Oh, how I do love them,
both, yes, you see.
I love them both
because they seem
the very same to me.
I knew it when I wrote the poem over a year ago, but couldn't verbalize why Light and Dark became the same. I know why now. Just like in the Matrix movie series, I've already made choices, and I'm slowly learning the "why" of them. The Darkness is as important as The Light. Without Dark's existence, Light doesn't exist, and vice versa. The Darkness may seem cold, but the cold is necessary to love the warm Light. It isn't accepting. Accepting is an egoic choice. Accept this, don't accept that. Emotional choices we make that are many times quite wrong. We people have no real good way to determine truth. But most people think that enlightenment is something we attain; it isn't. Enlightenment is surrendering to the known and the not known. Definitely not accepting. Not that I'm enlightened, I just surrendered to and fell in love with The Darkness and The Light. My love for both is how I surrendered and Dark and Light became part of me. They are both beautiful sides of the same coin.
My friend Garth says "Waiting, is..."
There is more that my wise friend Garth said, but to me, what Garth alluded to is that the waiting takes place in The Darkness of Not Knowing. I've learned that Patience is The Virtue of Darkness, and Love is the Kind Action of The Darkness. So, I wait with patience and love in The Darkness of Not Knowing for the shift of that waiting part of my soul to The Light of Knowing. Jesus'time in the Garden of Gethsemane was his Darkness and his Waiting, and his "death" was his Knowing and his Surrender; his shift to the Light of Knowing. He showed us how to wait, believe, and surrender to what is. He showed us how to Love What Is.
Name your what is; it is what we wait for in our innocence of not knowing, and in our wisdom of not needing to know, we can see that everything as it appears to us in the moment is always benevolent. Just like Jesus surrendered to his own death... Through the Virtue of the Darkness, we learn that nothing happens before it's supposed to. By the Kind Action of The Darkness, we are propelled to the attracting power of The Light of Knowing and it's sweet restoring warmth. It took me years, no, lifetimes, to believe and surrender...
Funny how things turn out... Finally, for me, the murkiness of the duality of dark and light, those primitive limbic thought processes in our low consciousness that is our curse, rose into the night, and into the ether, where God's mercy transmutes it into the pure energy of love.
Be kind to yourself and to others this season, and always...
TC,
Michael
P.S. Read the Bhagavad Gita translation by Stephen Mitchell
Copyright (C) 2010 by Michael G. Hesley
All Rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment