Clearing and Igniting

(A friend wrote this.)

First the ground is cleared -- the primarily negative work is done. Itis during this period that the great depressions swoop down, the financial difficulties, sometimes losses after losses. It is during this time so often we felt we were going off the deep end -- a time of intense emotional states, depression, anger, rage, jealousies, anxieties and doubt. It is also during this time we sought every possible remedy to heal what we felt was sick. If there were surface healings, still the deep disjunct, the central dislocation remained, and no expert we found even touched the depth of pain we couldn't accept.

All during this most difficult period ground was being cleared. If our practice was inquiry, we found ourselves increasingly aware of every painful thought. If our practice was more service oriented, we found ourselves helping others until we came to exhaustion. If our practice was art we reached the pinnacle of our abiities, and found it was somehow not enough. The brush of self was being burned, cleared, through the suffering that we at first hated.

At a certain point, begun to be known, perhaps by extreme exhaustion, perhaps by what felt like a death and burial of our old self and world, but characterized by a strange lifeless rest, an intitiative not of our self comes like a single spark. We can't believe it but something or someone or some place begins waking us up in a powerful unity and love, and it has nothing anymore to do with our efforts. Like the wind lifts up a sail, we find ourselves getting up again. But something is very very different now.

This divine initiative, this spark, comes under different aspects to different beings --- under the auspices of varying symbols; the symbol of a Person or personal Love or devotion (perhaps Christ to the Christian tending), or the symbol of a place like home, or a distant city or pure country, or "Pathways Through to Space" (to those of a journeying, exploring tendency), or the symbol of something more abstract, a geometric perfection or image (to those of a scientific or more abstract mind.) But this "initiative" cannot be believed (it just is); when It comes, absolutely nothing in the world or in thought will draw us any longer. It powerfully unifies what for so long felt like a stillborn self in pieces all over the ground.

This Initiative is love, ingition that just grows and grows, a powerful uniting, an increasintly mirror-like clarity, the sound of Home that is humming beneath every moment, Warmth even without persons around, joy that steals over your face and people wonder about you, complete Safety, and permanent falling back into unquestioned provision, and it includes all of existence and no-existence in its presence. I'm aware of how lame these words are to try and describe it, but I can't seem to help wanting to try. It feels like little sqawks of a bird that has seen something and can't help but try and sing.

love
Laurie

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Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
-- Henry David Thoreau