Loving Reflection

The glowing garden I walked in was full of the most impossible light, I could feel it shining through my cells into the centre of my body so that I felt as insubstantial as the air around me. The beauty of this light and the garden it illuminated, released silver tears of grief and worry from me, untying the last knots of my solid existence, followed by tears of gratitude.

Slowly walking around the garden I could hear and feel a gentle murmur of bees humming and felt the sound of birds singing as a rising and falling sensation of happiness, connection and ecstatic love within my body.

I didn't begin flying but as I approached the mirror I was no longer walking, it and I were drawn through existence to each like rushing rays of the light to bring me face to face with its cool, smooth, glass which as I touched, I could feel the weight of and I became more solid again. Seeing became easier in the solid mirror and as soon as I saw my hair I knew I was dreaming. Looking down at my hands I was mesmerised watching them turn as I turned them, reflecting in the mirror. I stroked my arms and held myself smiling at my reflection.

Exploring the scenery of the garden again, this time in the mirror's reflection, it was all more greenly vibrant and real. I could still hear the birds and insects but although I felt joy and excitement and delight, my emotions were separate to their sounds now. I stood a long time, watching and daydreaming? just being peaceful and happy until I noticed a familiar guide walking slowly toward me in the mirror's image.

The realisation that I strongly didn't want him to approach me dawned as I began to feel fear and panic rising through me that severed the clarity of my connection, Losing control of the dream, time jumped forward in starts, so that he was next to me before I could breathe. I held on to the frame of the mirror tightly looking down so as not to connect with him but I sensed his calm gentle presence standing next to my right shoulder. I could feel he was smiling and almost, gently, lovingly, laughing as he began to reach over my shoulder. I saw his hand and all awareness of sensations within me ceased as a yawning space in existence opened up around me and I sensed the ginnungagap behind all I could see.

Tightly as I held on to the mirror, when his fingers lightly tapped the frame it became air again for a moment and slipped, literally, through my fingers. As everything re-solidified, I could hear the mirror falling, thudding, cracking and shattering into thousands of fragments and everything was gone.

I could no longer sense or see anything around me through the grief, just the fragments of mirror in front of me, in which I desperately searched for all I had just lost, finding only distortions, stretched out twisted dark lines and things that made me feel afraid to focus. As much as I resisted seeing the dark things, trying to glance over them quickly, each one stabbed its image deeply straight into my centre bringing feelings of fear, abandonment, self-disgust and self-hatred, grief, remorse, embarrassment and shame.

I knew what each distorted image contained, many things I have done, the mistakes I have made, the life I took, the damage I have done to the earth, the ways I have betrayed trust placed in me through my own cowardice, my failures as a parent, all bringing more grief and unbearable remorse. Things that happened to me that I did not want to see at all, the feelings of shame and hot tears, the terror of anyone seeing that me, and my further, deeper shame of shutting that me, unhealed and unprotected, into cold isolation, leaving her to live the nightmare of how she felt, always alone. I was the abuser locking her in, ignoring her endless nightmare and abandoning her.

Trying not to feel, my eyes frantically searched unable to see clearly through the storm of feelings, not wanting to look too well as each moment of focus cut me again and again almost drowning me in dread, until suddenly, finally, came peace. The tide of images and feelings subsided and I realised I was looking into my own eyes, my face looking out at me complete and whole and contained in one shard of glass. Smiling, her/my attention taken and absorbed completely by the beauty she was lost in. The love I saw pouring out of her face felt more tangible and solid than any of my terrors now seemed in retrospect. This was reality, this was truth, this was the centre of my existence, endlessly Loving.

Looking into the Love in that one shard of glass I was healed and held forever.

I looked into the image, searching around for the beauty, searching in the little pieces of sky and garden greenery I could still see reflected around her, trying to listen for the birds or the hum, looking at her beautiful dress and body, perfect and warm and healthy. She was so beautiful and the split second I realised how beautiful she was and an inkling of envy arose in me for her beauty I realised the Love pouring out of her was her Love for me! The amazing beauty I wanted to witness was the me she could see looking back at her in the mirror.

Everything I knew about myself, fell, cracked in two, opened, tumbled out, spread, obliterated and was warmed into an incoherent cloud of passionate, gentle, over-powering Love.

I floated in the cloud, letting every atom of me be soaked and filled, saturated to overflowing, at which point I could suddenly, exquisitely, feel the love so intensely the whole process would begin again until eventually, very gradually I drifted back to consciousness.

Among the thousands of shards of mirror I could see the one with my face reflected in it immediately and had no need to look at any other, but I did anyway, looking at the pieces of my story with Love and compassion and welcoming joy that all these human, humane moments of life and decisions were mine. I sent out reassuring love and a sense of embracing to each of the shards for a long while until I felt finished and ready to bend down and pick up the shard with my face reflected. All the others were clear.

Taking the shard I sat with my guide who handed me a piece of glass-paper to sand the sharp edges so that I could hold the tiny mirror safely, and he showed me future images of myself sharing the mirror with others.

I saw and felt my Love, compassion, joy and sometimes gentle amusement at watching people's reactions...some holding tightly and crying, some dismissing and not looking, some giving up the glass easily, some needing to hold and gaze for a very long time, others showing me their reflection so that we could enjoy the beauty and Love together, which touched me with Love ever more deeply all over again. I could sense happy tears of gratitude and the beauty of the garden again.

Able, for the first moment, to look deeply and clearly into the face of my guide I became aware that he was more than one, I saw many I recognised in the flickering images I inferred from his calm loving face, and many new faces too. I thanked them all with Love and we hugged and held for a while before I had to leave and return to my everyday world.

Symphony of Science

There is really a lot of amazingness out there at the moment! I'm quietly having the most excellent ending to 2009...
I was really feeling un-prepared a few days ago...I still have a very odd sensation that there has not been a year between the end of 2008 and now!
Whenever I'm in a car on a motorway, which isn't very often, I get a very solid sensation that my existence is really just that continuous moment in the car on my journey...that everything else I experience on one turn-off or another, for one day/week/month or another, is in it's own timeless bubble of existence. That regardless how long it appears I have lived between each motorway journey in reality it is less than a blink of time.
That is how I felt standing looking in my bathroom mirror this morning, less than a blink since the end of 2008...feeling super aware of some underpinning moment.

Through one of John 'Halcyon' Styn's blog posts (a beautiful one may I add) he shared this video which in turn I share here. The video comes from Symphony of Science a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. Enjoy ♥

And this one just fit so in with my headspace at the moment that I had to share this one too!



♥♥♥Wishing you a Love Filled Wonderous New Year!♥♥♥

Ted

Reading your writing
Is a physical experience
Ideas stepping off the page
Into my awareness
Setting off
A cascade of

recognition
acceptance
Love

Sometimes what I see
Is a hole in the logic
A space that lets the Love
And Mystery

Fall through

And ideas
Rush through me
To bridge the gap
Reaching to
The beautiful underlying structure
Of life.

I am a little dumbfounded

By the divergence of my life

From what I had imagined

I have done things I never thought I would

And never did the things I thought I dreamt of


There's a sadness to those thoughts

And more than a touch of curiosity

As to how little I knew

Or still know

And an over arching sense

Of happiness, mystery and amazement

At how all this can still be me being me.

Been listening to the gentle warm tones of Leonard Cohen tonight! This one is so beautiful:

Suzanne is perhaps my favourite song of all time, usually as performed by Nina Simone, but Leonard's version is beautiful too.

Love from Kathleen Keating

Wishing you Love from me too.

I have stumbled, pushed, pulled,

and directed my whole life

toward the expansion of my divine humanity,

an inner largeness

that keeps spreading my soul before me

and expanding my spirit around me.

Something closed and cold within

keeps turning me toward the eternal glow of love

until I melt and overflow

in tears and screams and laughter and roars,

and vitality spins around me like a dance.

I can't stop now.

I have taken risks

on purpose because I believe in love

and accidently because I was naive.

I not only have been burned, I have been consumed

in the fire of hope.

But after the pain I am always resurrected,

to my amazement, again and again

and again.

Each time I dust off the ashes of experience

I am deeper and richer

and closer to the wonder of who I really am,

and, as the family of humankind,

who we really are.

Taken from 'The Little Book Of Love Therapy' by Kathleen Keating

Grateful for Gillette

Came across this yesterday...exactly when I needed to! It's from the often deeply refreshing, interesting and nurturing blog Ex-Courtesan in Transition (again)

I Believe

That things can change.
That they do so in their time. Their time.
That we can rejuicify and re-ignite our lives and relationships, even in their darkest hour.
That there is an exquisite balance between being with what is
and excitement about possible futures.
That all is well, even when I can't see it.
That the world is abundant with infinite possibility.
That the glue of the universe is love. Even loving fear.
Yup.
It's a good day.

'That all is well, even when I can't see it' Seeing those words written down by Gillette moved them within myself from the 'wondering if I'm just kidding myself though' category, to the 'reasoning and faith of a perfectly wise enough woman' category.

Very grateful for that.