Truth is whole and living and malleable in our hands!

Lately what's in and out of my mind?  Discrepancies. Like in character.

I was living on the road in early 2012.  Hanging out learning magic AND practical ways of how to heal the earth. At a Tibetan Meditation Institute that hosts a bunch of starry-eyed heart-fueled pagans for a permaculture school for 2 and a half weeks every year.  This is up in the Cazadero hills, Sonoma.  I was both, still am, both a peace-full compassion junky meditator and starry-eyed earth-worshipper who believes in the magic fuel of an open heart and can get down in and with the transformative power that happens when we deal with the real deal: our own life-funk and shit. 

A man who was at that training said something like, his contradictions were the best part of him.  And that's it:  Permaculture, 101.  That life thrives the most at the edge, where two ecosystems combine.  Where new life can be let in.  And that's us.  Humans.  Our light part out in the open and our inner dark, our hidden shit.  The center where they combine.

One's not more real or important than the other, which some beliefs would have you worhsip.  The shadow is more real bc it's not persona.  The persona, which can be light-touched, "spiritually" touched, is more real because it's conscious.

Ok so yea, I tend to feel more whole and rich around a starry-eyed shadow-walker than a light-filled shadow-thrower myself! ;)

But to me neither side is true.  Or maybe each is.  Each is a part of the truth?

To me, rigid definitions of our self or each other can become the end of personal vitality.

As I write this, Dead Prez's rap "the cause of your ignorance, flaws in your discipline."   And I get that, the need for discipline, particularly as it arises out of self-introspection and contemplation.  But also--what if personal discipline includes shaking off dogma, includes shaking off any adage that professes because I am this thing I also must be this…?  Meaning, isn't self-discipline about self-honesty?  Isn't that the depths of it?  Honestly looking at what's real about us, shallow or deep or in-between as it possibly is?  

And also, I don't mean just looking at our selves.  I mean making room to embody it, to give how we're feeling in our heart embodiment by being it.  Experiencing it, experimenting with what's emerging.

This is a major issue with words, by the way.  How they are symbols for something we already associate.  Which means we will read them written by others and embody our preconceived notion of them instead of allowing the thought-function to drop us in more deep.

(Pardon that interjection…)

You know Gandhi right?  Most people do, at least because of that meme  you must be the change you wish to see.  If you study him, like really try to get down with the man behind his words…Read his autobio, read the critical readings that arose from that.  Gandhi's whole point was live what you believe, live it, embody it.  AND if, as you do so, it no longer feels exemplary of your soul, change what you speak to match what does.  Change how you be to meet what's true for you.  Be the change you wish to see.

Of course, this coming from a man who lived women as second class citizens and who also believed sex and sex energy was wrong to embody…

DISCREPENCIES.  Truth is whole and living and malleable in our hands!  That means changeable!

AND we can't see whole parts of our selves sometimes!  The shit is in the dark!  That means we can't see it!  Haha the best we can do is have compassion for this, understand we are half blind groping around for light and touch.  Each of us.

I have this buddy Justin who I love.  He said in December that he was worried about me.  That my mountain was blocking out my sun.  He was talking about grad school.

That's just it.  When you can't see--you can't see THAT YOU CAN'T SEE!

Have mercy on us, each.  May it begin, within.

Last week, I walk out to the driveway to get in the car and go to my favorite place, Mermaid Beach.  I wanted to, had to, go dive under the ocean green.  Crazed Kelly zeal.  A hummingbird catches my eye and mesmerizes me in the deeper way.  I drop in, meaning, I recognize that it stirred my heart to see that little bird, so I honor the stir.  It reminds me in that moment of a time in 2004 when I was living in the national forests and wilderness in this country. I lived the reality that it is possible to be able to interact with nature and to experience nature outside as reflective of your inner nature--follow me here, this is BIG mindbendy stuff--to Know them as one thing.   To embody nature as interactive with you, as reacting to you as you too react to it.  That this can happen if and when you deprogram your ideas that that's not real.  I think all this in an instant because those years of 04 and 05 is when that was my primary lesson, and it partially started with an experience while living in the woods with both hummingbirds and butterflies.

Hummingbird is a symbol for spontaneous joy.  I think of this driving to Mermaid Beach, let my thoughts of this symbol spiral me down more and more to the heart where living truth is.  Feel jamming and alive in the moment.  Yea, dude.  My JOY'S BEEN GONE.  This feeling of life inside me.  It's been so…FLEETING. I haven't been awake to it, because you know…Dark.

Next thing I know I am laying out my towel on Mermaid Beach and here flies up this sweet little hummingbird doing horrible unstoppable spirals at my towel unable to stop bc his or her little wing is hurt.  I mean she's freaking with the panic look in her eye.  She or he lands then at my towel and I scoop her or him up in my scarf and do reiki on the little creature, singing and loving it and very gently caressing the little sweetie, bc really, what else is there--that's all we can really do.

Then when the warmth passes and I can tell it's time to put him back on the sand, I do.  She sits about a minute or two and then flies off no problems.

So I get to heal a symbol of Joy.

So now here I sit, thinking about rigidity, and dead forms of things, and how our vitality can disappear easy as that.  And old systems of self-care, and giving too much because we think it's what were supposed to do, and how this is as rigid as it gets: "supposed to".  And how we don't see, cuz we can't see that we don't, til we do.  

If you're following ANY of this, good for you.  ha

Discrepancies.  Sid Hartha, Herman Hesse.  He wrote about it.  Everything is true including the opposite of the truth.  

So yea, seeing the shit!  Dark paradise, when finally on comes the light. What will I choose (the holiest discipline there is: choice.  And it's opposite too, deciding not to choose…a half-lined choice, itself) today to make alive?  Who do I get to be?

(and will it look like a long ass diatribe instead of my thesis, Ch, 3???)