I have arrived.
I am home in the here,
In the now.
I am solid.
I am free.
In the ultimate I dwell.
I have arrived.
I am home in the here,
In the now.
I am solid.
I am free.
In the ultimate I dwell.
I have arrived.
Wherever the thinking mind takes me,
Into the past or future,
Into places of regret,
Shame,
Longing,
Into fantasies of future,
Destinations I think will make me happier,
Or even places I plan to go to as part of my everyday life.
I have arrived.
I acknowledge this arrival is the only one I can guarantee and fully experience.
Dropping all allegiance to any other whose only reality is in my ephemeral thoughts,
I choose this one.
I have arrived.
I am home.
My arrival is not just an airport lounge or place I feel a stranger to.
It is home.
This home is not where I live alone with family or friends.
It is not my physical burrow or nest lined with the things I have chosen to bring me comfort and pleasure.
I am home in a way that is so profound I can feel it anywhere so long as that anywhere is in the here and in the now.
This home in the here is the only place where life is available to me and in the now the only time when life is available to me.
All of the places and times are illusory and insubstantial.
They only exist when I create pictures of them in my mind and then react to them with my emotions,
Making myself temporarily happy or unnecessarily sad.
I am solid like a stone on the earth.
I am solid like a wise grandmother who tends the hearth fire.
I am solid like an ancient tree who has roots so deep in the nourishing earth it cannot be blown over.
I am solid like a person who knows the true worth of treating the here and now as home.
I am solid when I feel this deep at homeness within me when I feel my solidity with the present moment I begin to perceive where true freedom lies.
Not a time and place in the future when I might have less responsibilities and worries.
Not in the past when I seem to remember I was more carefree and perhaps I was but here right now as I cease to hold my cares in my arms like weights.
When my mind lets me lay them down I am free when I let them flow from me into the earth even for this one instant.
I am solid and I am free.
In the ultimate I dwell.
And then there is this big leap that some people might call a leap of faith.
In the ultimate I dwell.
What can be meant by this?
Where can this ultimate be?
Nirvana?
Shangri-La?
Tiana Nogue?
An imagined place of fantasy?
Do I need to be a Buddhist to experience it?
Is this ultimate somewhere better than I have ever been before?
Better than the here and now on earth my home?
Is it something I will experience in another life perhaps when I am enlightened?
Perhaps then I will be able to dwell in the ultimate.
As I look more deeply,
Find myself spending more time without thoughts driving my mind here and there,
I recognize that the ultimate is already within me.
I can feel it.
I can touch it.
It is my consciousness.
Consciousness itself which no one has ever satisfactorily been able to describe or pin down.
It is what opens up inside me just as a path opens up in front of me on a walk.
I cannot describe it in words.
I can only point to it in poetry.
But I have and can experience it whenever my mind is still and peaceful.
As I look out from the space behind my face I perceive a vastness within me which is always there even when my thoughts eclipse it.
It is the unchanging,
The life of life,
Love itself,
The deepest and most profound intimacy I have ever known.
The ground of being,
The ultimate.
It is the one place of safety when all else is lost.
I choose this as my home.
I choose to dwell here and choose it or not in the ultimate I dwell.
I have arrived.
I am home in the here,
In the now.
I am solid.
I am free.
In the ultimate I dwell.
