Climbing the Naked Tree

I climbed the Naked Tree today: my favorite tree in the world. The sun is warm, the breeze cool. The fields around the great tree are bright yellow mustard. The breeze makes the mustard flowers move in swirling waves of unanimity. The Great Tree is suffused with strength: about 50 to 60 feet tall and utterly massive: its great gray truck splaying out in 10 different directions about 25 feet above the ground, then stretching outward and up, licking up sunshine, drinking wind with eager leaves.

I pressed my body against the huge trunk and felt its silent strength in stark contrast to its lithe, trembling twigs and clattering leaves all around me. Suddenly it was so clear: this Great Tree and its lessons; the wind whistling its counsel of radical forgiveness and release; the sweet burble of birds in natural song; and the silent earth beneath, resting in its massive weight, alive with glory-making fecundity.

Life… the great mystery, the supreme teacher, the Living beauty, the spontaneous happening just beyond the sphere of ideas and words. Why have we required more than this? I sensed in a moment of innocent clarity that we really can return to Paradise here in this world… that the fiery sword is not that horriid a fate to face and pass through: that it only kills bondage, that it only melts duality, that it only slays fear.


To hear poem: The Ecstasy of Trees

A New Way of Thinking

Einstein wrote, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking. Thus we are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond comparison. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."

Can we hear Einstein with the sobriety and seriousness these words should evoke? A new way of thinking requires a recovery of the truths and values written inside us by the fingers of Nature, or Hand of God. We must let Life start thinking in us. What I mean is there is an inherent wisdom in all Creation. This wisdom does not think in human symbols — but it can! We can allow the Language of Life to harmonize our bodies and brains.

All Life is singing the glory of its existence and the wisdom of its delicate relationships. It is an unbroken field of interrelating energies. All, except for us. We must now clearly see ourselves as broken off from this web through 300 years of excessively left brained thinking and the paradigms of life we have developed that are inherently self-destructive.

It is the nature of the left brain to distinguish differences, to analyze, to break down into parts, to structure in new order. But without the inspired, insightful, creative, mystically related right brain the order it creates is too inclusive and limited. We create independent systems without regard for their relationship to the whole. We are now experiencing the catastrophic potential of such imbalanced and partial thinking. We must, must, must shift to new patterns based on universal values expressed in new ways.

Thomas Berry eloquently echoes this. "The New Prosperity requires a new language. This new language is primarily the language of the earth, a language of living relationships that extend throughout the universe."

New thinking demands a new usage of language. The two are inseparable. If I think differently I will express myself differently. If I am growing more attuned to the rhythms of the stars, the energetic shifts of seasons, the balances or imbalances of our food producing soils, the quality of water, the greater good of humanity and all wild creatures, I will speak of stars, weather, earth, fire, water, birds, deer and bear, the laughter of children.

We have journeyed away from nature for 300 years now and learned much. We are in a tremendous place where we can take the best of our insights, tools and technology and the ones that shall yet be invented in order to create a new world of harmony and peace, where people love nature in a way they never have before: seeing it as both motherly provider and source of inspiration, beauty maker, marvel and delight.

We are on the cusp of a new era. Those who cling to the dying age will resist the changes with all the strength born of their fear or greedy lust for power. Those who let go and embrace the challenges and changes are in for a very inspiring ride through the death of life based on consumption into life based on quality of relationships, simplicity, creative freedom, harmonizing with the whole, sanity and peace.

HEART DANCE

I listen to your eyes
with my whole body
until your eyes open
as my whole body sings
with the beauty of your eyes
seeing my beauty in wonder.

The NoMind Festival

I have just experienced another Angsbacka NoMind Festival in Sweden. It is a week in Paradise with a flow of blessing upon blessing as so many hearts open to reveal the secret beauty of the world. Workshop leaders come from all over Europe and the world. There are around 50 workshops a day with lots of music, dance, incredible organic food, and best of all, countless loving encounters with a rich variety of beautiful souls who shine with the Divine glow of Love, and hold in their sparkling eyes the mystery that is revealed in awe and creates a deeper awe.

I know in my body and bones that one day the world will be like this, for what is happening here is just Life in us, unbound, realized, revered, and surrendered to: the Light we are, the way we are designed to be and know. In this is wonder, achingly tender Love: opening, opening, deeper into the warm receptivity, the bestowal, the flush and flow, the flowering.

God is Love in action: blessing upon blessing... this silent shock of beauty, this silver shiver, always so far beyond words, yet somehow pouring through our Love-infused, child-like attempts to paint the wind with words.

The festival is called NoMind because in all its rich diversity the secured intention is to move beyond concepts and all mental facsimiles into the immediacy of Life as awareness, Life as the awakened urge towards Loving harmony, Life as a free flowing creative happening in the eternal Now. As mental veils part and old, primal fears melt away the naked Spirit shines in the bright Ocean of Love. We are inwardly embraced and sensitized to the rich flavors of the sky, the green earth, healthy food, each human word and glance as Life becomes what Love makes it, a wedding feast of awareness, a celebration of breath, a huge, wild and kind awakening.

A NOTE FROM THE FESTIVAL:
So many opening hearts. And, the shining of the mystery. Bright, open eyes revealing the unutterable beauty, the hint, the glimpse, the shine of Divine Beauty, the call in. I longed to dive into so many eyes. If I could only be more receptive, emptier of all need, even the slightest stir of insecure ego, then, I think I could slip into these eyes and pass beyond the silver stream, the golden flow, the opening curtains into the ultimate freedom, our home.

SPIRIT IN OUR NAKED CENTER

A new time is upon us:
a time of spirit in our naked center,
land in our circumference:
feet deep in earth, heart in open sky.

In this time of extreme urbanization, when the dream time of merchants which so forms our collective consciousness draws us to the edge of a precipice—will it take the rising roar of waves beating down city streets, filling gutted department stores with foam to wake us up from a truncated vision of what is real, this materialistic spell? Will it take the extinction of the polar bear, or the walrus, or the robin or the bee before we awake to realize the supreme peace and Life-presence inherent in the quick of every cell in our bodies?

Our economies are driven by the myth that mankind’s most natural state is an ache of constant need; that the true nature of man is a ravenous consumer. Is it possible that this belief acutely enhances perpetual, restless, human unhappiness? Could it be that this perception, expressed through the artistry and endless repetition of the advertiser’s barrage spills over into bleak, grieving pain passing itself on: the blind longing for an unknown, missed cohesion in Light, grinding out more pain, inflicting our children through dangerous, degrading words, the harsh slap, the snapped and sapped issuance of loving awareness, plunging adolescents into needless alienation and densities of soul?

I am convinced that what is essential to creating a more just and beautiful world is staring us right in the face, reflected in the Light of our eyes, but our minds are mesmerized by a illusionary worldview propagated by merchants. We are so used to a consummeristic way of beholding life we assume it is “normal”. You need a better this. Life will be better with a better that. What you now have is just not good enough. More and more is obviously better and better. Of course, don’t we all know that this is just how civilization must advance: new inventions driven by human nature’s inherent thirst for something more? But is it? Can we safely assume that we need more and more and more to be happy, that we, by nature, are bereft and bored and need lots and lots of things to stimulate us into happiness?

As long as we believe the lie that who we essentially are in our most naked essence is not enough, that our inherently natural, unbent nature is not relaxed and open, fluid, creative and harmonious, but rather wounded, tense, constricted and in constant need, we will continue in our mutually created and increasingly dangerous dream. We will continue to act out a cultural conditioning foreign to the actual nature of our essential existence at the expense of the Earth and future generations. And we will never discover the profuse and free nature of Life itself as it can be, unburdened from mental illusions, pouring as Love and liberty through our open energetic beings.

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