LET LOVE RULE!

When she awakens on Mother’s Day Sofia presents me with a sweet card she made herself.  We decide to play with clay together and collaborate on a colorful landscape with a mouse, a shrew, giant flowers and a large pink bird.  For a leisurely brunch we drive to the beach in Canggu and then take a dip in the big ocean waves.  A sand fight ensues between father and daughter.  Graffiti on the beach steps reads, “Let Love Rule!”

That says it all.

It is a quiet day, a let-the-minutes-pool-into-a-puddle kind of day.  I did not take my phone with me nor my purse.  I remind myself to appreciate this simple freedom.  Not such a long time ago I would not have gone anywhere without the mini pharmacy in the inner pocket of my handbag, my cardiac insurance policy in the form of aspirin, nitroglycerine tablets and valium... just in case.  It is surreal to type these strange words.  It feels more like the memory of a movie I once saw and vaguely remember than the events of my own life a short while ago.

That was just a brief period in the long stretch that is this lifetime, most of which has not had a thing to do with pharmaceuticals of any kind.  Yet most of that long stretch has been influenced by this same fear, suppressed in my subconscious mind, leaking in mysterious ways into my experience.  Now the fear has lifted, or at least much of it has, and I am wondering what new adventures I will create without the ingredient of fear in the mix. 

I have a dream one night here in Bali.  I am in a house, standing in a room beside the entry corridor.  Abruptly a madman enters the house, a thief.  He is dangerous; I think he has a gun and I can tell by the look on his face that he is crazed.  He walks by quickly, passing the room I am in, heading down another hallway.  I think he will find me eventually.  I feel awash in fear.  At the same time I am aware that I am dreaming.  I place my forehead, my third eye, against the wall beside the open doorway of the room, coaching myself into a more relaxed state, and the fear dissapates.  I wake up from the dream having transformed the fear.  I realize the thief is within me.  The thief is the fear I have lugged around with me throughout my life and it steals my joy.  But I am no longer beholden to this thief, this fear.  I have found a way to dissolve it.

Decades ago on the coast of Kenya, a had a vivid dream.  During a section of the dream I was walking through a small Kenyan town when I noticed a thief inside one of the buildings, crawling on the floor in the opposite direction.  It has taken these decades of living to realize that the thief was my sense of disappointment that I had carried in a dark corner of my heart and finally released through the incident two years ago some people called a heart attack, an experience of releasing old, congealed thought forms by means of leaving my body and then popping back in.  Now I understand that I have carried another thief, the fear, less sneaky than the disappointment, more panicked.  In the Kenyan dream I continued to walk, heading in my own direction, until each step forward also elevating me one step higher off the ground, eventually soaring into the night sky and through the cosmos.  

I am reading a book entitled When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening.  After years of paying close attention to her spiritual growth, the author has a sudden and mysterious transformation.  She describes the change beautifully, but the only problem is she does not know how she cultivated it.  Through a reserve of grace, I suppose, she has awakened at the perfect moment for her, but she can’t really chart a course for anyone else.  She does demonstrate what is possible.  She no longer experiences fear at all; in the large space where fear and worry used to dwell a vacuum forms and bliss rushes in to fill the vacuum.  Love rules.  She still experiences difficulties with children or work or whatever, but the bliss continues throughout, no matter what the circumstances.  A profound current of love carries her always.

I am going about my life, riding my motorbike down a small side street in the village where I live, when suddenly I am aware of a realm of existence behind or beyond what appears so tangible in this world, and all at once I understand the impermanence of all that I know as this life including the I that thinks of itself as rooted in the physical world.  I see that I am a tourist on earth, visiting for the time being, belonging somewhere else, somewhere that is not a place at all but rather an awareness.  And all at once I realize that everything I see is like a movie, or a dream, and that the place that is not a place and is not visible is more real, is the most real, the eternal real.  This realization penetrates through the day to day doingness of driving the motorbike, avoiding potholes, accelerating, breaking.  It does not infringe upon the driving of the motorbike or diminish my functioning in the world.  It actually heightens my ability to be awake and present in the moment.  It heightens my appreciation of every thing, person and emotion in the moment.  The sky stretches before me in beauty, the sunlight on the trees glistens in magnificence, the other motorists on the road are my companions in this play of consciousness.  Love rules.