Love After Love

This is a time when I am rather full of all the various forms of spirituality I have encountered. Last night, I attended a Native American Sweat Lodge ceremony. The prayers, singing, and drumming were my favorite part since I love to pray. I am feeling so good physically from the release of toxins from the sweat. I enjoyed making new friends so connected with the earth and their heritage.

I do not find that I am attracted to any particular spiritual tradition these days. The belief system is unimportant to me although within me I am drawn to positive, loving, and simple traditions. All preferences are part of how God manifests through me\us. At the level of mind and thought, I see these as flavors or notes of the divine essence in each of us. I can feel the vibration of someone's essence from the tone of their voice or the music of their spiritual tradition. Sometime's I can just feel them beyond all that. It is all good.

What captures my heart in all this though is the realization that I have been locating myself inside thoughts and feelings about myself based on what others have taught me I should believe from their belief systems personal, spiritual, or otherwise. What I mean by this is that I will experience a thought or a feeling based on what I have been taught, and I will say this is "me" and this is what I should do about it. It does not matter if the thought or feeling is interpreted as good or bad although the emotional charge will provide impetus for action. Regardless, there is an immediate identification with it as me. Invariably, at that level of living as soon as I take a position I am in alignment with some and not in alignment with the thoughts of others. So, I can only conclude that oneness at the level of thought or mind is not possible and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because obviiously the world was meant to be a place of beautiful diversity. How do I know? Because that is what it is whether we agree on the beautiful part or not.

I find it is time to come home where the oneness really is and that is in the beingness, the essence, or how I feel the life force manifesting within me each moment. Beyond the words I can take down all the structures and experience the pure awareness of myself and put my attention on that awareness. 

I do not have any more wars that I have to fight so I can let all thoughts, beliefs and thoughts in as well be o.k. with that. I am not in the business of attaining a level of goodness that gets me anywhere when I can begin to see the love and the kingdom in the truth of who I am now in my essence. I find it very pure without the need of any purification ceremonies or rituals. It is who I am. In this, I can fall in love with me as God manifests through me and you as one of the many flavors of life in the world. By myself and now even in public more and more I can look in the mirror of awareness and realize that I am the love I have been looking for my whole life everywhere else. In that I have attracted some beautiful mirrors of Love in you of which I am Thankful and grateful each and every day. 

 A poem from Derek Wilcott...

Love After Love

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other's welcome

And say, sit here. Eat
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All your life, whom you have ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott