Life is Making
Fullness of life involves openness to whatever life hands you.
Hard.
Easy.
Whatever.
The only way to experience life with balance and completion is to be all in. Each aspect of you. Nothing left in the cupboard.
Nothing ignored, rejected, forbidden, forgotten or lost.
The fury, the lust, the child-like animation, the reliability, the volatility, the tendency to be late.
It’s all you.
No matter when that is.
No matter what’s going on.
And the now is where everything happens.
It can be a painful, scary place. And it can be ecstatic. Or it can be calm, steady, almost unnoticeable.
Our level of penetration into the now is called presence. We are only present to the degree that we can bear being in the now.
If the now is too painful, all or part of you will tend to check out. And there are lots of ways to check out.
Not checking out comes down to your ability to relax.
Fullness of life is our birthright. It’s why we’re here. And few of us have ever managed to claim it.
Because of what it involves.
Which is exactly what it sounds like.
Fullness.
Not survival. Not subsistence. Not getting by. Not even reasonable comfort or even opulence.
Fullness of life includes satisfaction and appropriate challenge in your work, your relationships, your environment, your inner experience.
Also, in your sense of what the future holds for you, the people you love, and the society and world in which we all live and move.
Devoting time and energy to a talent or an idea is an indicator that self love is present.
Developing your talents is crucial to discovering, experiencing and revealing who you really are.
If you are not doing this, then huge regions of your being go unexplored and your sense of self is not what it could be.
You may have created a safe, small world for yourself, where you are in control and things are comfortable.
Or you may have done the opposite. You may have created a world filled with stress, frustration, a job you hate or a relationship that keeps you on edge.
Either way you’ve blocked out your talents. A huge part of you is simply not present.
Because it doesn’t fit in the world you’ve created.
You’ve constructed or become trapped in a world where essential elements of your being are simply not welcome.
But you’re not really trapped. There’s a way out.
Or in, if you like.
It just feels a little dangerous.
In order to fully realize your potential as a human person, you must allow the unobstructed flow of God to pass through you.
It happens through your talents, your ideas, your relationships.
The energy that brought you into being and holds you there, also empowers you to reveal it to the world through your thoughts, words and deeds.
And you can participate in that on purpose, if you choose to. That’s how you love other people.
You take that flow of the love of God through you and you point it at other people.
But to do that, you have to love yourself.
Because self love is the love of God activated through you. And it is the source of the love you give to others.
Engaging in the now is a rigorous undertaking. It’s where all experience happens: pain and pleasure, insecurity and fear, creativity and joy.
The more time you spend in the now, the more you experience yourself as you really are.
No matter how distracted you are, nature will drag you into the now from time to time, with sudden sudden pain or joy.
By developing your sense of self, you can learn to return to the now on purpose.
You can engage in the rigors of the now willingly, more frequently, until residing in the now comes to characterize your experience.
It takes practice and it takes work.
But you can become at home in the now.
And doing that has a huge positive impact on your life.
The present moment is the glue of the universe.
It’s where all creativity becomes anchored. It’s where all relationships happen. And it’s the dwelling place of our real, unvarnished selves.
You can tap into that underlying energy and channel it into the world. But you can only do that in the present moment. Because that access requires conscious, deliberate choice.
To be in the present moment is to participate in the energy that underlies all things.
Love.
The present moment is love itself, abiding, watching us come an go, lamenting our departure, awaiting our return.
To practice the present moment is to allow the Great Making to extend itself through you, to take on unique, specific, unrepeatable shape in the form of you.
Air, Earth, Fire, Water
We have a unique challenge as human beings.
We’re here to engage in the process of becoming who we are.
Because we’re not born that way. We have to emerge slowly, over time, through struggle, delight, pain, discovery.
It’s a gradual removal of what is not really us, of characteristics acquired through inheritance and adaptation.
Each of us is an outcropping, and a particular manifestation of the underlying energy of all things.
That energy is commonly referred to as love.
So the process of becoming yourself is the process of allowing love to emerge.
As you emerge, as love emerges through you, the full range of detail that comprises your specific being emerges also.
Image by Heikenwaelder Hugo www.heikenwaelder.at
Love holds you together physically, emotionally, spiritually. It’s the basis of our being. It’s a bit like water in that respect, because human beings are mostly water.
But even water is held together by love, too, molecule by molecule.
So the more love there is around, the better things are for all of us.
We need it the way we need water. Only more so.
Lucky for us it’s infinite. It’s present at every moment, in every situation, in every corner of everything.
But accessing it and extending it doesn’t just happen. You have to do it on purpose.
Love is not an emotional state.
It is the underpinning of all experience.
It’s a vast web of synapses constantly firing all around us, blazing with creativity, delivering its pulse into every corner of space, every molecule of matter, every moment of time.
It is the basic energetic bond that holds the universe together, the structural framework upon which the universe hangs.
Taken together, all the faces of reality: physical, mental, spiritual, discovered and unknown, are woven together and given specific form by love.
It flows through everything, beneath everything, around everything.
We refer to this flow as existence.
And yet love itself does not exist.
It makes existence possible. It holds all things in being. It surrounds, supports and permeates everything.
Before experience, before the universe, before reality, before existence, there is love. All things spring from love and return to it. Love is before alpha. After omega.
