Dear Friends ~
I was writing in my journal today and felt it was a kind of love letter to you. I have thought of writing to you often in these past months, but this morning I decided to do it. Not particularly a special feeling, just a feeling. A reaching toward you. With love, with affection, with appreciation for us having chosen to spend some time together in the way of marked time, but also having connected in a universal endless time which really doesn’t fit with grammar, past tense, present tense, future tense.
This is really simply a sharing…
Journal, September 9, 2023
“I live these days in the fruits of my lifelong endeavors, which chiefly means accepting what is happening in and around me, opening to it more and more and, blessedly experiencing a flourishing of dimension, The small actions of my domestic existence have become sacraments – the particular cup for tea or coffee, the plate and cutlery for a simple serving of food, the washing of vessels, folding of clothes…
I sit on the beach watching people, birds, boats, waves, clouds, planes form a complex, mutating fascination as streams of motion, tighten and stretch, and objects diverge or conglomerate. Sounds pounce or pierce or vapor into one another. The air is heavy. Or the wind presses into my skin, pushing back my bones. The beach is one place I occupy, and it is preceded and succeeded by other places. Sometimes my mind separates me from this ensconcement, but I no longer feel concern because I know, on balance, that whatever my mind offers up of its habits and redundancies will soon pale next to the flourishing of dimension in my immediate place.
Without the years of meditation I suspect this falling into my place, inside and out, might pass me by. I don’t know this, of course, because we all choose our lives and efforts and can only know the one reality we have done and do never knowing how our past has delivered us to our present. And we never know how inevitably and uncontrollably our biology produces our current days.
I can only say that for myself I suspect I would be less able to find contentment now had I not sanded the sharp edges off my anxieties before now; had I not opened up my dungeons and shaken hands with my captive ghosts; and had I not been cut and ripped and mended sufficiently to keep going along, finding new ways, the way water finds new rivulets.”
So I felt like sharing this with you in part because it isn’t about a specific practice, about embodiment, about the right music, or the right movements, but in fact about what all those things bring us to internally. The rich inner life that we each move into when we move side-by-side. It is a great miracle that we have been sharing together.
I’ve been generally uncommunicative for many months now as I simmer in the flourishing of dimensionality. I just wanted to share right now in this writing because I thought of you. Because I often think of you. Because you are with me. And I suppose I am with you, though I don’t know it when we don’t speak or see one another. But I sense it. The richness I now experience in my day-to-day moments is part of what we have cultivated together, over many years in some cases and a few short periods of time in others. The realm where we have always met, where we are less individual and more connected, is always awake.
Writing to you now seems perfectly fine.
I am delighted that you are with me and appreciate your sharing these writings friends. Thank you!
My work and writing are sponsored by Dervish Society of America, a nonprofit organization helping people realize their human and spiritual potential by honoring their body and its movement ways using evolutionary Sufi Dancemeditation practices. Thank you for your gift. It’s tax-deductible! Contribute Now