From a divine spark, a hazelnut, an atom, a nothing ignited, mercy exchange, a reality of relating that constitutes poles that move in kenotic swing, a space of sparking that flows in and as us.  Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, The Cloud of Unknowing, Jacob Boehme, Raimundo Panikkar, just to name a few mystical expressions of reality as deep relatedness that relies upon the third eye seeing in the duality, and the dual seeing from the nondual.  Pick your proposition…  Just as that moment when ‘we’ are overcome, so it seems, by “our own” willful seeking does the alchemy of inherent relating transmute self and will into a cosmic field of wonder and compassion.

This is another attempt at what many seem to ‘experience’ in contemplative practice and beyond. 

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As I sit in practices of Gurdjieff, impressions arise in their own clarity, mercy flows across the realms, back and forth motion, the counterstroke of Love entering in where God does not dwell, the fragrance of the friction of tincture’s hidden power, “I am…I am…Mercy…Lord… I….am…. have…Mercy.  Divine breathing, warming its own image of breath upon the mirror I AM.  Sensation and non-experience.

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A squirrel with stealth motion moves each morning
across limber branches of tree spread along the garden lawn
making its way toward a single fig to be consumed.
How often this happens during the day, I have no idea.
I see only in this time.
Bouncing and pausing marks the movement
toward the food for now or later.
Intent in stretching and leaping,
hoping the next branch will support and flex enough
in adequate momentum to bring it that much closer.
Daring the divine for coating the body.
The effort teaches itself along the way.
Food for fire and light communion.
Wisdom seeping – silent and sapient.

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What politics are there in wisdom’s inconspicuous exchange?

Cynthia Bourgeault (Living School Alumni Quarterly Spring 2019 interview with Mark Longhurst) shares “the more we have enough being to work inconspicuously, the more likely and the more efficiently our work will connect with the places where the work is being done” And how is this political?..  not only by march or manifesto, but by a concentrated ability to articulate a heart energy and place it in a location so that the nature of the situation changes.

Here now in this world, energy flows in and out of balance.  Many are the names of the bulwarks that impede the flow – Racism, Sexism, Classicism and every other formation of self-will-ism seeking its futile dominance.  Yet, water flows under layered ice.  Fire burns within the earth.  What seems solid is only our fast-moving planetary bodies unaware or at least unconcerned with an ‘other’ hidden body attracting and repelling our own.

To bow, to breathe, to feed, in communal style – to spark in nothing, to ignite as mercy, fields of swing that are not our own – this is the practice we must engage.  Aliveness is always one step ahead leaving behind its ever-beckoning wonderful scent.

How do we smell the fragrance of a God of the future?  A God who does not dwell at all, but is only engaged in the outflow of mercy, which eddies back in mutual assistance to every body creative.  Love lives anew by dying to fear!

That sharpness felt, poking out, prodding dark, is always here.  Call me existence, yet hurt me not.  Can it be otherwise?  Perhaps there is a litheness to suffering. Could the tincture which brushes up against the body in-carrying it out, be something mistaken by avoidance and blame?  What invisible flares have we by-passed as simply pain, which could dare draw us into that tangential field wherein we make the fire ourselves with divine scratches on nothing at all?  The closest space between, the small window on the whole of reality, contingent eternal!

The smallness of the nothing, a hazelnut held, a quark affirmed, is always also the concentrated heart energy, unbridled and indivisible bursting into fractals, the divine outflowing, the counterstroke of manifestation, where only love can enter/create.  Is this political?

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Yet are we led or are we in the lead?  And who receives?  Whose wake is this and what impact is that?  Are these the questions that only masks the singleness that draws “I” in and breaths “am” out?.  Deep centered down.  Roots in the earth.  Sap of the tree.  Birds in the breeze.  What seeds must we plant to weave into past weeds of delusion, heading toward the harvest of the human? Even winds that pummel our posts, held together by a web, stay strong and supple.

One small strike each moment is enough for love to move alive in nothing and everything!  The small silent tap sounds the ferocious gong of concrete eternity.  Vibrating bodies seemingly alone, produce new life unceasingly in fields unknown and in love.

Must we doubt the unseen or believe the now?  Excursions of analysis flounder in the heights, yearning to drop down into the cardiac depths of the one single body… moving.  Indivisible and overflowing, the mirror shatters into rays of life, shards of grounding converging fecundity.

One small strike is the single stroke!

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Some of the figs are half-eaten by birds,
     who seem to prefer a less-sweet taste.  
         The pink flesh of the fruit torn asunder from feeding
            looks at me with incompleteness and imperfection.
               Still there is fullness…and…
                   I wonder if the fig-bandit squirrels know they too commune!