You Have One Message

Last week, I had a dream that I was hanging out with some kind of "angelic" being in a vast, undifferentiated space. I was invited to play, so I made up two short, vertical lines a small distance apart from each other, with a long, crazy, squiggly line linking the two that looked like an erratic heartbeat glyph on a cosmic monitor. The design appeared as I imagined it, immediately, in my field of vision. After a moment's hesitation, I wrote a descriptive word underneath it: "Monster".

My friend seemed to thoughtfully examine this creation, and reproduced it exactly, a little to the right, with a different caption (in my own writing): "Moving Stillness Being Blessed."

Hmm.

All of this activity took place in a simple, childlike way, from an innocent, intuitive heart. My companion didn't criticize the original design, but made an offer to my offering. I realized that one was not better or more true than the other. One was not more beautiful or ugly. I could feel the dreamlike tug of opinion before it dissolved like fog in the sunshine.

I turned to this being, my friend, being so brightly indistinct, and tried to understand all this in a way that I could carry into the multilayered complexity that life enjoys so much. I knew I was dreaming, all of a sudden. And just in the turning toward, I felt something in a very deep way. Talking about it scatters the impact, but it seems to need expressing.

On the surface is the obvious message that opinions and comparisons are meaningless to reality-in-itself, whatever that is, which accepts absolutely any description or design laid upon Her, like a tattoo birthed in the heart to appear, organically, on the flexing skin of all that is. She doesn't care what you call it, what meaning is ascribed or which logical path was designed to support this whole thing. Whatever's clever, She might say.

Underneath this lovely indifference and impersonality (so that we can be personable) lies a song in a language that appears foreign, until the body and mind let go into the hearing. The song isn't about the design or the path; the song is of the singing, itself, the very act of calling an "object", thought, feeling, wish, tree, dance, breath, birth, death, particle/wave into being by noticing it. Noticing is a miracle. Deeply noticing is blessing.

In ancient days, blessing was done with some kind of sacrificial blood, great ceremony, honor and ritual, people impressing the importance of another person, place or thing upon their minds and hearts for a lifetime. In a way, this was daily life brought into the spotlight of community theater, an attempt to remind ourselves of the sacred realms we are steeped in. Get it, people--we are incarnate, we are temporal, we are fragile, and in this cosmic blink lies tremendous beauty that is missed when we forget to see and feel it, when we deem being alive to be so common and painful that it is beneath our notice (until we realize it is slipping away, perhaps). 

Explaining everything to death intellectually may be necessary--I don't know. What I do know is that I, like every other thing, am full of some kind of sacrificial blood in which the world appears and disappears, like a dream. I look at a fencepost, and it comes startlingly into being out of the Vast Soup, with color, texture, dimension and the scent of peeling paint. It does this just for me, with me, right now, in a moment never to be repeated, in absolute uniqueness. Fencepost Maria has arisen. No other human can ever be this experience in just this way. This is true every second of every day. No one will ever "understand" this, because there is nothing (thank god) to be understood. Just one creative miracle after another, for anyone willing to be this.

It is the act, the silent singing of everything into being that is so spectacular and effortless. I don't know where this song comes from or why it is. I just know when I'm fighting it.