Like A Child

From The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.

What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.

It seems our authenticity is tied to what is de-pressed and what is ex-pressed. Just as flowers need healthy root systems in order to blossom, feelings can only express their beauty when they are rooted cleanly within us, breaking ground in some manner, sprouting outside us. It is that delicate paradoxical inch of ground between surface and deep, between flower and root, between what is allowed out and what is allowed in, that continually determines whether we are living our lives or not.

I try... I do.

Anyone following the entries in this journal will know the reason why I have been finding expressing feelings such a struggle - a daily struggle that I am working on. constant instances of 're'-pression. (How's that for continuing a theme?) Now what I find is that battling reluctance and leaning on trust makes the expression come out all muddled, and I end up frustrated, and that doesn't help either.

It should be so easy right? 'I feel x because...' easy enough to type; should be easy to say, but what am I looking for in a response. Rationalisation? Understanding? Acceptance? Compassion? I don't know. Sometimes I think all of these things, sometimes I think none of them at all... and sometimes, when I'm at my very low, low, lowest ebb, it really does become a case - a very childish and selfish case - of, 'See what you did? I'm feeling like this because you...' and that doesn't make me feel very proud of or accepting of my own efforts to express myself at all. I try to make sure such episodes are few and far between.

But maybe even that is some kind of cry for help?

Transcendent Moments.

From The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.

Where two deliberate, the love is slight.
Whoever loved, not having loved at first sight.
-Christopher Marlowe

At its deepest and most real level, the notion of love at first sight is spoken of in every spiritual tradition as the reward for being fully awake. Such seeing anew restores our sense of being alive Paradoxically, firs sight is recurring. In the same way that we wake every day, we regularly return to first sight in th e rhythm of our wakefullness of spirit. Whenever we can see with that original vision-with nothing between us and the life around is-we can'thelp but love what we see. to See so fundamentally opens us to love. to love so fundamentally is to see the world we're a part of as the vibrant, ongoing creation that it is. So, it really manifests this way: at first sight we find love; at our first true seeing, the love that is already there touches us.

I am lucky enough to have experienced this on many levels at many different times.

The most recent, and powerful moment was on visiting the overlook where Mir and I had the ceremony for our wedding. We'd been there before. An overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway - Glassmine Falls ovelook, at Mile Marker 361. We walked up there, stood there for a few seconds just looking and listening with that 'firstsight' as the journal puts it, and after a moment or two I was flooded with such emotion and the beauty of the place that I couldn't keep the tears from my eyes. The soul of the place spoke to my soul, and it was love.

It was a love that brought to mind and heart a whole collection of instances of love, like a chain of it stretching between us, the bright connection that exists and has existed for a long, long time. It is hard to put such a deeply spiritual moment of connection into words. It transcends just about everything, from actual 'first sight' moments that were never acted upon until much later, to all of the things that we've shared through the years of our relationship... good and challenge both. It was a moment that was just a perfect moment between us and embodied past, present and future... a future which is now some several months in our past as well as that which is still unfolding before us.