Radical Roots

Showing up in my life at last, I found myself to be a Radical.

Full value goes with full experience as Life, rather than as a hollow victim/victor apart from it.

We associate the concept "radical" with some kind of extreme departure from the accepted or the normal. But the Latin origin of the word means of the root. It (like all things) has a delightful paradox embedded in it.

A full life is a radical one, in the sense that it is consciously lived as closely as possible to the mysterious core of what is, involving a kind of intimate, radical awareness. In our current culture, such living is viewed as "alien" or "crazy" or "impossible". Even abnormal. ("Normal", by the way, originally meant from the carpenter's square...firmly between the measured lines.) Never mind that the results of this insistent openness are often greater balance, peace, compassion and stability.

Rather than some threatening action or stance, real radicalism involves following an experience down to its origin until such a response to any given situation becomes "natural". Soon, there is less tracing back to the root and more living as an entirety...from seed to plant to flower and beyond. Rather than identifying with one stage or another, it is obvious and understood that all arbitrary stages are to be found here...since, somehow, the tracing ultimately comes from, and leads back to, just this. And Here is indivisible. All-encompassing. Impossible to get away from. I became a radical human when I quit attempting to flee or fight, and surrendered to my impossibly extended existence.

I thought I knew love--what a beautiful, protected bloom! Radical love, though, involves exploring landscapes so harsh that it seems nothing can possibly grow there.

Radical forgiveness takes place in just such a landscape, where the light is relentless enough that you become a mere mirage on the edge of your own vision...and you understand that this Universe forgives everything, with or without your approval. Only then is that terrible thirst eased.

Radical aliveness ensues. I am my own rain.

(Radical splashing in puddles often follows...for no good reason other than making a thousand tiny rainbows, or defying chronological age, or changing a sidewalk sea into many sidewalk ponds.)

All of this takes place quite effortlessly through the radical change going on everywhere in and around whatever we take to be our boundary of the moment...whether we like it, or not...with or without our attending.

Attending the process is the difference between talking about the quality of a diamond, exclaiming over the clarity, depth, and fire, attempting to place or manipulate value--and becoming that which scintillates. I am my own spark.

Radical attendance takes place when even the ego understands that it is far less than a servant, and far more than some Divine manifestation. There is no self to serve, after that; observing oneself becomes lambs eating spring grass, having a financial discussion with your mate, dreaming of closed doors in big houses.

Radical service is fulfilled in the loving notice that life lavishes on itself; every blink becomes some kind of prayer. Breathing is as good an offering as any. The response, here, is immediate and perfectly beneficial. I am my own symbiotic relationship. :)