Falling apart, holding it all together. Then falling apart, then coming back together. Cycles of clarity and confusion. Hopelessness and hope. Heartbreak and bliss. As the seasons of the natural world unfold, so do the creative and destructive aspects of love as it makes its way into matter.
Inside the opposites it is relentlessly creative, but there is no solid ground from which to orient. Some sort of death has occurred and we know that things cannot stay the same. Something is calling, reaching back into the past from a future that is marinating in the womb of now. But what will be reborn from the ashes is not yet known.
Rather than scramble out of death and into rebirth prematurely, stay in the fire. It is unknown here, naked and fresh, and pregnant with the qualities of some new third thing, which transcends the opposites and the way things have been. Death does not need to be “healed” or “transformed,” for it contains its own integrity and is utterly pure on its own. Enter inside the multiplicity and discover the unity that is found only here.
If we remain too identified with “falling apart,” we lose contact with innate radiance and become misattuned to the holiness of immediate experience as it is. We disconnect with the magic of embodied presence, the wisdom of the earth, and the unshakeable confidence in our true nature. We forget that the darkness, when provided sanctuary, is brighter than a thousand suns.
But if we remain too identified with “holding it all together,” we disconnect from natural vulnerability and the spontaneous mystery as it appears, turning from the surging reality that things can disintegrate and reorganize at any moment. Raw, tender heartbreak may approach at any time, requesting safe passage inside us. But it is through this broken aliveness that the poetry of our lives will flow.
Right in the middle of “falling apart” and “holding it together” is the secret place. Rest and explore there. It is here where light and the dark are in union, integration and disintegration emerge as one in love, and lunar and solar weave together particles of the sacred world. Where the white emerges from the black and yellows into the reddening of the realm of the heart.
Photo by Donnchadh Murphy
The next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and
The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and
The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
