We never thought we’d have one of those fights. You know the ones I mean... the fights that neither party will ever under any circumstances admit was a fight. The ones that are largely silent and filled only with the echoey voids of communication breakdown. In the middle of it you know you’ve both lost, lost the race to being perfect together if even if totally imperfect alone. Because until then he’d mostly filled your silences or you’d let your need to be understood fly free with faith that somewhere somehow you are being understood in the bizarre and beautiful parallel universe where everything is perfect.
Understanding. Is it real? Yes, but it is not some eternal state. Once you’ve found it, there is no telling how long it will stick around. Like everything else, understanding is impermanent and requires great and tender focus, openness, egoless-ness, and presentness (the ingredients required to slip into a state of grace) before she’ll take you in her arms. When the balance is upset great holes appear... Or is it more like a game of snakes and ladders? The snakes are often the demons in our own minds bringing us right back down again. And the ladders? What are they? Nuggets of wisdom? The strength to rise? To accept the ascent as readily as the descent? Its all a bit too much sometimes... this world, these tasks and thoughts all at once. What will we do with our playing space?
It is my belief that expansion is the meaning of life. There are infinite universes within everyone of us and it is their slapping together that creates an incessant stream of big bangs, opening every moment to the creative potential. Ultimate understanding includes the understanding that this is a very difficult thing to live with. It is happening within every organism and inanimate object all the time. But as human beings with reflexive minds we are (depending on our desire to seek) living with some level of awareness of this fact. It is painful, it is scary, it imbues us with a sense of responsibility for the quality with which we receive and process this knowledge. Add into the mix my universes crashing against yours, trillions of particles displaced with every embrace...
Can physics explain why marriage is hard? Will we one day be able to map out our irritations and sore spots like constellations? Will super microscopes take the place of eye glasses and will we then be able to see the arrangements of quarks in our beloved and know... Uh oh... Will we one day have therapy sessions and dialogues that start off with “Honey, when you leave the toilet seat up it really creates a black hole in my 856th universe”, or “Babe, my 8th dimension is going crazy right now, please just pick an outfit”. Seriously though... as science reaches toward filling in the gaps in our understanding of the stratosphere and beyond, how does this knowledge relate to the life inside? The intuitive arts have always discussed energy fields and the results of vastly different intentions and desires interacting in close proximity. We all feel this phenomenon... it is such a part of daily life that it almost shouldn’t be called a phenomenon. Walk into a room where two people have just had an argument... you bet you’ll feel the flakes of that fight hanging. The grumpy guy in the cubicle beside you finally got laid... You don’t need to see the pervy photo’s on his phone to know something is definitely different. Some of us are better at immediately recognizing these energetic discrepancies than others, but we are all hard wired to receive information about our environment and fellow tribespeople within it. When we are up close with a particular person for an extended period of time we start to get acquainted with the seeming constants and variables in his or her personal equations. The intuition then starts to fine-tune to this frequency... but it doesn’t always find resolution or reconciliation when it shifts. And sometimes it is the fact that we think we know where the frequency should be that makes us especially irked or thrown off when its not where we expected it to be.
It is my feeling that the goal of enlightenment is motivated by the desire for ultimate understanding- communion with the ever expanding, the birth and continuation of all things. In order to do this, a lot of fear has to dissipate as does much need for glorification. I am also starting to think that enlightenment and understanding are the clasped hands of two cosmic lovers. Enlightenment requires a certain craftsmanship of thought, and can be encouraged along by a teacher under which one can apprentice. Understanding is the unfolding of the metaphysical heart, and is the most private of journeys. It is simply and not so simply the willingness to feel exposed and tender and turn off that pointed discerning mind that so eagerly wants to practice what it has been learning. Understanding is achieved when there is inner freedom enough to just love and be loved.
So what? What about the void? Avoiding the void... I hate the echoey void. It is in the echoey void that I become my alien and cannot be reached as there is not reception on my home planet. It is in these times I want to cut out my own tongue just to give myself an excuse for not having the right words. It is here that I want to make random apish sounds and articulate myself in some loud, raw, primal way. In these times all I want to do want to sing a soccer chant and hold up a giant foam finger that reads “Understanding is #1!” But maybe thats because these are times not for words, not for cognitive comprehension. These caverns and canyons between the particles in my heart and those in yours don’t actually exist in this model of expansion and constant crashing together. That feeling of painful passing in the night is not real. For any of us at any time. Everything is connected. Including my sulking and your confusion. We can always reach each other if we are willing to sometimes not know how. The gut feeling to get quiet, to not talk it out is right sometimes. Understanding can at times be reached through words but other times through food, sleep, staring at the sky, working silently on something, mediating on the unraveling of the heart, a kiss on the forehead or quite simply the clasping of hands.
I pray everyday for understanding, in love, in life, in work, in my art, and all the time with all the tender fractious hurting humanness of wanting to feel the ever present but often so hard to tap into truth that everything is happening all at once and is connected to everything else that is also happening... and that means me too! We are all on the inside. We are all in the know. I pray for the dissolution of whatever it is that impairs my ability to resonate, to feel the harmonies rising up to meet in the space between. Heaven for me is understanding, and understanding for me is hearing the symphony and moving motivated by its lilts and tempo changes, all the while recognizing that my involvement will in turn contribute to where the next movement resolves itself and again finds form.
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