The Sacredness of What Is

For everyone

Be gentle with yourself. We all turn against ourselves, sometimes. Be gentle and kind.

It is natural to be kind, and kindness is wild. Do not tame your wildness, your body’s animal wisdom. For it is there, in flesh, bone and blood that your cure (and much kindness and beauty and all kinds of joy) will be found. Lean in. Drop down. Embrace your sensuous self.

Consciousness — all of your perceptions, thoughts and feelings — is not found in your head, or merely through the window of your eyes. Consciousness is heart-mind, and gut-mind too. It is bone, blood-flow, and breath. It is skin and touch, dreams and emotions. It is the sacred dance of your whole bodymind with the sensuous world, of your holy biology with spirit.

We are taught to deny what is real, to distrust our very senses — taught to put ‘mind over matter’. But mind is in matter, and matter is animated by mind. Do not seperate what dances, tearing lover from beloved.

You are not alone, for you are a web of connections. Every cell in your body — human and nonhuman — knows you, and wants to be kind. The world outside your body’s (permeable) boundaries wants to know you, to connect and relate. All of it — inner and outer — can speak to you, show you the way, if you are willing to listen.

Do not clothe yourself in what you are not. We all wear masks, for fear of ourselves. No one should desire to play a role, or hide who they truly are. There is only one role for humans : to be human (and beyond that, earthlings), clothed in the beauty of a human body.

Your self is not a fixed entity, not a thing you can label, but a process, a constant evolution of life in human form. You move and grow and learn in order to get closer to being, to your unique gifts and purpose in this lifetime. Do not yearn for what you cannot be. Dream instead of what magic you can create, what beauty you can weave out from the ensouled flesh of your body to entwine with the world, an integral part of the tapestry of biology–geology–cosmology, and earth’s own dream of us.

Emotions are part of the ecology of human beings. They move us and teach us and urge us towards growth. So, you will find your self in anger — a powerful motion through emotion — as it leads you back to love ; and sorrow, that tender parent, cradles joy in her arms. You are held in an emotional landscape, alive and breathing, a being of ancestral blood and memory.

You are you, and perfectly imperfect, imperfectly perfect — the blessing given to all that lives.

When you strip away the distortions and illusions of (industrial) civilisation, what you will find is that little, perhaps nothing, is human-made. Instead, it is earth-made, earth-given. Earth our Mother, our home, our teacher and resting place.

Your body too is earth-made and -given, created with a purpose in mind. What we are is not destiny, a fate set in stone ; though it does shape who we are, and what we can do, and there is a rightness in that.

To be given life is to be given everything and nothing. Somewhere in-between, we make the best of it. We must jump, and hope to grow wings.

There is nothing wrong with you — but there is something wrong with the distorted culture we live in — and that is what breeds our wrongness, wraps it up in our flesh as we grow. Our bodies rebel — naturally, because they are wild — for they cannot abide what is unnatural, untrue and unneeded. So, they get sick, depressed, anxious, turn hatred and anger inwards, because they only wish to be what they are. No more, no less. 

It is the distorted culture (not human beings) that needs to change, to be destroyed and then regrown from the roots. Only then, when rightness and naturalness is bred into us, will we be be able to truly heal.

In the meantime, you will be given what you need, and it will be enough. But first you must learn to accept it : trust in your worthiness to receive yourself from life. You will be yours, and home at last.

Your self is not your suffering. That suffering is a teacher, if you pay it heed. It is not you who is wrong, but the distorted world and its illusions. That world lies ; but the Real always speaks true.

Reality precedes any thoughts or feelings we might have about it. Biology precedes any social or cultural ideas or artefacts we might impose upon it. The earth, and the natural way of things, does not make us suffer ; we (that is, the distorted culture) create our own suffering by not living according to the rules of the earth, which are ultimately kind, and beautiful beyond understanding. 

It is in what is — the Real — that you will find comfort : in your heart that beats to a rhythm that has sung in the veins of life for millennia : in your breath that, with each inhalation, fills you with the soul of the universe : in your unique face that can show so much of who you are, if you let it.

It is hard to love yourself in a world that teaches you to hate yourself instead ; and it is wrong and unkind for that self-love to be expected of anyone, for that notion turns all of us into unwilling victims, thinking ourselves unworthy of love because we struggle to love ourselves. The truth is that we are already loved — by the mothers who birthed us, and the earth who made us, and many, many others (past, present and future). Lie back in that comfort. There is nothing for you to do but live and love where you can, and then that life and love will come back to you.

It is hard — oh-so-hard — to be human. But there is a radical map, of roots and tendrils, pulsing veins and neural pathways, which can show you the way. It will lead you down into the bowels of yourself, earth-bound and star-infused, to show you the light in the dark. The map can only be found in what is, the real beneath all that we think we know — the biological–geological–cosmological whole — spirit’s vessel.

Let what is be your guide. Step up the ladder of your ribs and embrace your heart. Lay down to sleep in the cradle of your pelvis. Stand tall upon the trusted soles of your feet. Bend toward the centre from which you radiate, and be : like a tree, a bird, a river rushing towards the arms of the sea. Dwell with and within yourself, sheathed with life.

All will be well if you learn to read the map, to follow it into life. Nature knows where you need to go — and it is not towards capture, but towards liberation. Back to the wild.

Perhaps I will meet you there.