Belief and Life

When logics die, the secret of the soil grows through the eye
and blood jumps in the sun. Dylan Thomas

I have learned that we see life not only through what we are, but what we believe. This is the prime filter, the colored glass that interprets the innocent white light of the sun. And I have learned that belief is, more than we most often realize, a choice. We choose to believe what we do, whether from the standpoint of familiarity, or security, or because it resonates with our repressed, traumatized being, or because of mutually shared hopes and dreams. If we want to really change our experience of life we must change our beliefs. This is the primal principle of Life, and there is no getting around it.

This is actually good news, because if a belief is ultimately a choice, we only need to choose to be happy and free and then inspect and question our beliefs that oppose it in order to turn them around, bring them into harmony with an innate sense of joy, that which gives rise to our spirit, that which harkens to us, calling us into a broader, freer place where Love is a free function, the primal reality.

Right now we can look at the world and shake with trepidation, for the shakable things are being shaken. If we believe that the economy is our hope and help, our security and well-being, then we are in a precarious position, for the world order is collapsing to allow space for a holistic, spiritually alive and harmonious new state of humanity. But if we shift our beliefs in ways that open us to the waves of Grace that are sweeping the planet, then Grace will soften us, detach us from old habitual identities, expand us as it opens us to the miracle and divine beauty of Life itself.

We have been in a collective spell and are waking up to the Universe as it actually is. No matter how expansive and beautiful our beliefs can grow, the ultimate reality of Life is forever beautiful beyond our beliefs, beckoning us to open more fully, celebrate more joyously, love more passionately, live more wisely, and thus grow big and strong and tall in heart, becoming all we are capable of being.

The Animal Us

THE ANIMAL US

How do we know that we don’t have fur just underneath our smooth skin? I mean the fur of a black bear, smeared with berries and the blood of fish. Oh, the x-rays won’t spot it. It is rougher than coarse stone, finer than air: this animal body in our bodies, this connection to a miraculous creation.

Part of our brains are on a brilliant kind of autopilot… just brilliant, inventing a million ways to keep insanity going in the world. I mean the oh so familiar dysfunctional disconnection that someone soaked us in, an incessant washing of the brain with the milk of discontent. And so the familiar conditioning says, don’t look too deep into the most of you, you might find too much trouble there, while the symbol making, music loving, heart-beated, drum thumped, danced crazed and wild heart of us goes on whistling dream songs beyond the reach of us, luring us through luminous looks and moments of confusing clarity.

There are birds in our blood, the trees are kissing us with every breath. Great beings watch over us from realms where a thousand earth years are one very interesting day. Some of us are kings in these worlds, some queens, some wizards, some prophets, all adventurers, who signed up to be diminished into flesh, squeezed into this world of forgetfulness, this place where we learn the hard lessons of willfully destroying the web of light through every little discourtesy, with each lie, continually shattering the wonder-child’s trust with this twisted insecurity that drives our greed.

It is closing time now: the night has fallen and we don’t even miss the hidden sun. World makers beat the dead horse and shout, it is bound to get up any minute now. But it is over. The whole system is collapsing. Time to wake up. Time to turn it all around, get down on our knees, look into our children’s questioning eyes, refind the deep soul of us, nuzzle earth. Time to let sharp claws tear our skin open from the inside. And in the dark eyes of the animal us a smile will appear, reflected in each eye, lighting up the distant horizons, spattering golden beauty all over the world.

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

RECREATING THE SACREDNESS OF THE NATURAL

There is a spiritual pathway that is just the opposite of our current economic/social patterns of ever increasing wealth generated by ever increasing consumption. It is a pathway into a profound simplicity of life for the sake of lightness and freedom; an increasing clarity of mind through realizations of the Real; an expanding Love of heart through a growing state of sensitivity to the beauty of all that is natural and good. This way opens to us through an astonishing discovery that we love what we love in life just because in some way it gives us a taste of the essence of what we all most truly are: through that song, or that gadget, or that place, or that person, we sense the freedom, beauty and joy that is the very pure nectar of Existence.

These times of collapse and uncertainty have thrust upon us the imperative of a massive change of perception much greater than politics or current religious paradigms can give. Let’s get with it now!

If you would like very practical help with personal transformation, see the free resources at: The Inner Healing Center

THE HIGHEST HUMAN PURPOSE

The highest human purpose
is always to reinvent and celebrate
the sacred.
N. Scott Momaday

We live in a galaxy of 4 hundred billion stars which is one of a trillion galaxies. To get some idea of how many a trillion is, if you made a photograph one meter by one meter in which were a thousand galaxies densely spattering the blackness of space, put enough of these pictures to cover a 10 meter high wall a 100 meters long, that would be 1 million galaxies, (1,000 stars x 10 pictures high X 100 pictures long). To show a trillion galaxies the wall would have to be a million times as long. That’s 100 million meters long, or 100,000 kilometers. This is just over 62,000 miles. The circumference of the Earth is 40,000 kilometers, or 24,900 miles. So the 10 meter high wall would be about 2 1/2 times around the earth. Another way to envision this is you would have to have 10 of these walls going from Los Angeles to New York, 10 meters high, all densely covered with spatters of galaxies. And each of those galaxies has an average of 400 billion stars.

We have images of God basically formed in the Bronze Age by passionately tribal people of an exclusive God concerned with his own reputation. No wonder there is so much disinterest in religion on one hand and conflict between different religions on the other. Such images are not in harmony with the vast, beauty-filled Universe the sciences have been discovering. What if our image of the Divine kept being renewed by sacred artists? What if we never settled for any spiritual reality that did not make us luminously, laughingly free because it is just such good news? What if we acted on our deepest instincts to be wide open, whole beings in love with Life, with all of Life… with all the rich diversity of Life, including people, including cultures, embracing all the differences? What if we started waking up from this “dream of life” created by the competitive business community and started to embrace one created by synergistic harmony makers, beauty-makers, lovers, poets, and creative thinkers in every sphere of Life? What if? And… why not now? Time for a revolution of thinking, people.

The very, very good news is, it is happening, right now, all over the world, one soul at a time.

AWAKENING THE WILD CHILD

Leap a little, do a bit of an Irish jig,
perhaps every day,
perhaps while standing in line at the Post Office.
No, because you read it from my mind,
do something different, something fresh
on your own:
like singing opera at the gym
during a "serious work out",
or walking down the isles at the supermarket
playing a harmonica, smiling at everyone.
If you are a woman, do something wild
and Lilly-like every day:
like giving a purple or golden scarf
to an old woman in a nursing home
and fashioning flowers into her hair...
or, out-crazying the children,
riding their makeshift pulley out to the stars.
If you are a man, do a prophetical act everyday:
like running out of the office
and digging your hands into the earth,
rubbing it into your face.
Then wash the dirt into the bathroom sink
as you hum sea chanteys
and spit into the waste basket,
rubbing your cheek where a beard should be,
and speaking like a pirate into the mirror,
telling all God's invisible warriors
that you would pour your blood out upon a stone
for one whiff of the fragrance
of a wild woman's spirit,
and that you would just as well grasp wind or fire
as that lady's freedom.

Blake Steele's Poetry


WALKING SERAPHIM

There are some women
—rare as blue horses—
who burn with life,
who emit sparks,
whose words ricochet around the room.
You may ask them a simple question
and their spirits quiver, then suddenly expand
far beyond the boundaries of their bodies
like tidal surges,
like thunderous waves of green water and foam,
flushing away all grayness,
washing concrete down drains.

Blake Steele's Poetry

KISS BY KISS

Poem:

Kiss by kiss we explore the real Universe.
Not by telescopes or microscopes
does it open its secret beauty.
A lover has other eyes
that sees more than two worlds.

Observance:

Left brain looking; right brained luminous seeing.
Left brain logic; right brained leaps into fire.
Left brain getting along;
right brained howling laughter at poverty.
Where is that part of you that licks the face of the sun?
Where have you hidden the naked child
who dances down dingy streets
dressed only with ribbons of flame
flying in her hair?

(Click on title for more poetry.)