Beloved,
I know what it is to believe in an objective world,
A place that exists apart from you,
Indifferent and untouchable.
In that distance between two things,
There is room for lack.
In that separation,
There is space for anxiety to take shape.
But what if everything you experienced was,
In fact,
Deeply familiar?
As close as the texture of your own skin,
As intimate as bare feet touching the grass.
Imagine recognizing,
Even in the most terrifying of moments,
That this experience is none other than you in disguise.
Would you be afraid of life,
If you knew all of it as yourself?
Our bodies never actually touch an objective world.
We only ever sense our skin's response,
Our eyes' adjustment,
Our mind's interpretation.
We cannot take a single step outside of our own nervous system to see what is really here.
We inhabit a human lens,
A unique perspective on what this universe feels like.
When you press your hand against a wall,
You aren't meeting a solid object.
You are feeling electromagnetic repulsion.
You are meeting your own pressing.
Gravity is not a force pulling you down from the outside.
But the curvature of space-time holding you in a silent embrace.
Seeing is not the perception of color,
But your own mind's translation of light into a private internal masterpiece.
When unkind words are handed to us,
They are vibrations of air.
Their effect is governed by our own patterning.
What we do with those vibrations is our own choosing.
Just as we can interpret the same piece of art in 8 billion different ways.
When we feel overwhelmed,
It is not that the world is too much.
It is that our physical sensations and mental overlay have filled the entire field of our experience.
We could say something simple,
Even a little daring.
Life,
Other people,
Environment is the way we experience ourselves.
This means we are not at the mercy of our circumstances or even victims of our own conditionings.
We are relationship,
The fluid point where experience gets to take on a meaning we assign.
We can't control the weather,
The traffic or other people's words,
But we do participate in what shapes us and how we respond to others who are simply experiencing their own interpretation of reality.
We do not hallucinate the world.
It is very real,
Subject to vast and unfathomable conditions.
But we do hallucinate our separation from it.
We forget that we are the relationship between all things.
This separation is the damp and moldy illusory gap where all kinds of sorrows,
Conflict and destruction grow.
If we look closer,
There is no inner and outer.
Your awareness of a thought,
A bird's song and the dull ache in the knee are not three separate attentions.
They are one seamless awareness moving through three different phenomena.
Never once crossing a border.
Must awareness first open your chest to feel your heartbeat?
Must it stop knowing your back ache before it can include the passing wind in the hedgerow?
When we imagine a threatening,
Unfamiliar and uncertain future,
It's only because we believe that who we are,
The me who is simply a thought-based orientation in our mind,
And not a separate entity in our head,
Can be diminished by our experience.
But this is not fundamentally or experientially true.
To know yourself is to know reality,
And reality is the safest place you will ever be.
You and reality are not and have never been two distinct things.
Let's make this a little more embodied.
You can close your eyes and make contact with whatever is here through your senses.
And without taking a thought for an answer,
Ask yourself,
Where does the world end and I begin?
Try and find the exact point.
If it feels like your skin is the layer that divides you from the world,
Just notice how you can hear beyond the skin of your ears.
How you can see beyond the skin of your eyes.
How you can sense invisible love between yourself and another.
How we extend beyond our seeming borders in a way that truly embraces every inch of the world.
You might like to keep your eyes closed as I share the following poem.
Poetry has a way of slipping through the mind's blind side,
A way of touching something deeper than thought.
Just let the words that mirror your own soul permeate and allow the rest to fall away.
When the world feels sharp and the heart feels thin,
There is something quiet,
Worth remembering.
Perhaps there never was an out or an in.
That weight in your chest,
That ghost in your head,
Is no cold invader to fight or dread.
It is the same pulse,
Moving through the tree,
Your own life,
Appearing gently as me.
It's tiring,
The vigilance,
The plans,
Trying to hold the whole world in your hands,
The fear of lack,
Of wells running dry,
Rises even as you stand in the ocean,
Listening to the waves,
Not knowing why.
Control feels so necessary,
So tight,
A white-knuckled reach in the middle of the night,
But the more you pull,
The more the thread thins.
You cannot hold on to darkness when the light begins.
You might pause the climb,
For a single breath.
This search for safety,
This race against death you seek for a home in a phantom of time.
A perfected future,
A ladder you climb,
But this self you carry,
So tender and deep,
Was never a secret you had to keep.
It was never a vessel,
Vulnerable and small,
Meant to carry the weight of it all.
Feel your hand resting on the chair,
Notice the quiet firmness there,
What seems other is closer than it seems,
Skin meeting skin,
Warmth meeting warmth,
The inevitable intimacy of all things.
The world does not strike from the outside,
It meets you,
Like the earth holding your feet,
Like the air falling into your lungs.
You are not a target,
But a relationship,
A bead on a necklace strung by a cosmic thread that has never once been broken.
When words land sharply,
Let them soften.
Listen to insults as you would to the rain,
Vibration in space,
Ghost notes of pain,
For even the ache is energy in motion,
A ripple of salt in a borderless ocean and the silence that knows it remains vast and wide.
Like the moon's steady pull of an unchanging tide.
If something in you feels breakable,
Let that too be held.
There is a wholeness here that does not need to declare itself,
The silence that hears it is untouched and deep.
The sky,
Where the stars lay their secrets to sleep,
You cannot be broken,
For you are the whole,
The form and the formless,
The spark and the coal.
Rest in this moment,
Let the boundaries fall,
You are the dreamer,
Dreaming it all.
The world is not other,
The world is your skin,
You have always been home and you were always invited in.
May you remember,
May we all remember who we are together.
