On the path of the heart you will never be asked to “get
rid of your story,” as if it were some defilement to cleansed perception. At
times you will wear it as an ornament and at other times you can set it down,
allowing it to rest from a long journey, picking it up again and playing with
its textures, colors, and fragrances, dancing in the contradictions as you open
into the mystery.
We human beings are storytellers. Go ahead, tell one. Then
listen carefully as the characters, plots, and settings share their wish to be
authored in more integrated forms. Practice intimacy with your story, touching
the beauty, the pain, the joy, and the heartbreak of your life as it has
unfolded over the months and years. Hold it close, but not so close that you
become engulfed and lose perspective. What you are is pure imagination, as the
great tantric master Willy Wonka reminds us.
What story are you telling? It is a kind one? Does it
represent the deepest truths you have discovered about your experience? It is
alive? Is it whole? Does it embrace you as you fall into the mystery? Is it
rooted in the actuality and raging creativity of the here and now, or is it a
remnant of an outdated there and then?
Hold your stories close and allow them to breathe and share
their soul. There’s no need to be afraid. You will not be tainted, or lose your
way, or fall from grace, or lose your “powerful” nondual realization. Come into
the playground of the relative world, with all its richness and color. You need
not fuse with it or become lost, but enter inside as a courageous archeologist
of the heart. Because you care about this place, about how you and your sisters
and brothers are making meaning of a crazy world, a world that has forgotten,
and fallen into trance.
Go ahead, get messy, get gooey, send your awareness into
the untidy, the chaotic, and into the muddy earth that is your glorious body
and imagination, for there is no greater temple. End the spirituality of
disembodiment and aggression, and dare to care for form as much as formlessness.
For it is equally sacred. Cradle the form in your arms as you would a newborn
baby, as it aches to come alive here and share its essence.
We’re all storytellers. This seems to be a unique
expression of being human, of interacting with our world and exploring its
meaning, its purpose, and its contours. We don’t know if a rose tells a story
about itself, or a deer, or the moon, or an owl. In any event, it’s nothing to
be embarrassed about or to think of as lesser than other modes of being and
expression.
Even your story is pure when met with eyes wide open, a
luminous and irreplaceable expression of the mystery that you are. What you are
is pure imagination.
