An otherwordly contentment filled my day today. Something that should have caused me sadness brought me peace and tenderness instead. Accepting that resolution and forgiveness will never come, that is one thing. Feeling love in response, how strange. Every time I thought about the situation, I just felt open, relaxed, and warm. There is nothing to worry about. Nothing to do.
Somewhere in the core essence of every unresolved matter is the inexplicable “just as it should be.” Things go awry, and yet the universe knows exactly what it is doing.
Being estranged and disconnected from anyone has always been hard for me, but now, I see disconnection, and all I see is surface turbulence. I’m not on the surface. I’m floating in the still tenderness below, looking up, laughing at all the commotion. I’m surrounded by presence. Or rather, there is just presence. Not something different from what is. Just what is. Without the fabrications and ruminations of the conceptual mind painting a picture of the relationship landscape, there is just presence, and nothing anyone says or does touches it.
I thought that I would be triggered. I thought I would see loss, that very profound, fundamental loss of “other,” when I received a message asking me to stop communicating (from the same person who asked me over tea why I had never extended a direct apology, argh). Like a game of “red light, green light,” I lost, walking forward during a red light. To be pushed back when I already had the desire to recede, what a horrible feeling. Normally, that would press my button, but the button is just gone. There is no button, no system wired up to the button, no framework at all to support any suffering in response.
They are, at their center, just loving beings attempting to traverse this dream without getting hurt, and there is no “personal” here with which to take things personally.
My general perspective has strongly shifted, as though some magnificent light has been cast on everything, and I see all the glimmering detail, and now I cannot forget the reality of what’s in front of me. No imaginary emotional terrain. Just this awareness. Normally I would be trying to “see” the objects in the terrain. Anger? Disdain perhaps? Apathy? I don’t know. I don’t feel compelled to figure it out. I don’t need to know. Those things are transient anyway.
Yet, at the same time, I don’t feel numb either. I simultaneously don’t care and still feel an open kindness. I can love and let go at the same time. Bliss! Letting go into indifference or dislike is easy. It’s letting go or walking away and continuing to feel our human connection that is the trick. I’ve been trying to learn that trick for years.
To be honest, I haven’t thought much about what should have triggered me. In fact, I haven’t had many thoughts at all today except to wonder why I feel so amazingly good. Lately, so many of my posts have been ruminations about why I am not ruminating about something, endless mutterings on the bafflement of being totally undisturbed by things that would otherwise turn me upside down.
Why am I glowing? I have no good reason. No good conceptual reason. But I look around, and that is it. IT. IT makes me glow. I don’t know. Just peering into this direct experience of what is, it’s like I can see the reflection of everything and everyone, past, present, and future, and it’s all perfect.
Why? Because everyone, the whole, ultimately loves everyone. If I could hold up a mirror to you, a mirror capable of showing you an image that is a composite of everything you were or will ever be, you would see the Divine light.
The trick is to learn how to reconcile perceptions of the Divine light in others with their occassionally alienating behavior in a given moment. The learning is not intellectual but rather more like learning to ride a bike.
I don’t know anything. All I know is that, given recent events, I should have spent the day agonizing, but I didn’t. I spent the day basking in tenderness, and I don’t understand why, and it required no effort.
