FOR THE NEW YEAR: A SCRIPTURE OF CREATIVE IMAGINATION AND SCIENCE - Laura Hope-Gill

We ease ourselves from under the darkness of linear rationality. Our  eyes adjust. Our perceptions have been rearranged. Our thought processes have been rearranged. Our concept of reality has been rearranged. We look around and ask whether anybody else is experiencing this.  The answer is yes. We are. We are in the turning. A returning. We are turning into what we are. Sloughing off the hard casings of our senses, we move with ease. Through the corner of our eye, we glimpse the imaginal realm and question whether it was anything or nothing at all. We question if we are crazy. The glimpses grow more frequent. We start to trust them. They then start to trust us. 

Awaking to our magical selves is as unnerving as it is assuring. We haven’t ever really bought in to the idea of a rational, dull, black and white, cut and dry, protracted, mechanical view of reality. We have worked hard to pretend. We have kept our gifts of perception to ourselves. We know how to play make believe with the surface world. We have kept our mouths shut. It has been like hiding. It has been like playing pretend. We are discovering the doorways, and we are going through them. We are sort of heart, loose of thought, quiet of observance. The space between worlds is shrinking.  

What was taught us as cosmology has collapsed. We no longer place a heaven or a hell at the mortal finish line of life. We never understood that. We know now that the “marriage of heaven and hell” is here around us and in us. We cycle through our transformations faster now. Our hearts break, and we understand what they break into. We know we are being healed toward wisdom. We are brave now. We dive into the crashing wave of attachment to retrieve the detachment inside it. We know how to cry and love and let these guide us toward wholeness. We are astonished all the time, and we are kind. 

We make no excuses for the challenging nature or our perception in two worlds.  We don’t try to find shortcuts and caveats. We appreciate the rewards yet don’t expect them. We understand that what we are a part of is magnificent and perfect even as we move through a broken world. We have faith as our evidence. We have left the ground and remain upon it in this new way.  

We see both realms when we look upon the world. We read it with the sacred language bestowed on us by our creativity. We make friends with the amazement. We take deep breaths, and we smile. We decline the desire to explain this. We know our words will fail. We are humbled. We are sweet and gentle because this ok is how we keep the door open. We accept the silence of our awe. We relax.  

When we feel we are asked to serve this, we do. We understand we are bodies of compassion. We  welcome our creativity and generate beauty as we are shown. We sustain one another in witness. Our Stories connect us. I’m telling, our interconnectedness reveals. We stay open in the listening. We are patient for the echo. 

We withhold assertion and explanation. We stay in the husk. We are not the teachers but the taught. We are emanation, all of us. Nothing is outside of this light. Nothing extinguished it. Nothing takes hold. Nothing loosens. All is woven in. The less we reach, the more we attain. The less we proclaim, the more we say. We are 13 billion years old. We have always been this. When we die we will always be this.  

We understand the thresholds. We know we can move through them. We know how much pain we can withstand. We know how it appears. We also know what it conceals. We know it dissipates once we step through. We step through and don’t look back. 

We understand that the stories of the first half of life become our medicine in the latter half. We understand that with each story we tell, we are healed back into the beauty. We perceive the benefit. We maintain the mystery. We share the joy that arises from our brokenness. We are readers of the world. At first we were unsure what was happening. At first we were afraid. We stood in our fear, and we were shown.  

We perceive the whorls at the surface and the rich depth within every instant. We adjust our eyes. We retrain our ears. We understand the nature of things and the Nature of Things. We acknowledge our love for the surface and the depth that follows the wreckage. We know pain is our awakening to our love of the depth. We perceive this with our hearts. We stay brave throughout the wreckage. We welcome the transference from seen to unseen. We bless the passage with our tears. We grieve into dissolution with the whole.  

We understand the symbolic nature of Reality and are re-minded when we have grown disengaged. We maintain our imaginations with our creativity. We stay wild and allowing. We resist falling back into our sleep. We create ourselves awake and do not stop waking.  

We understand the story of the universe is the story of every god. We acknowledge the wisdom of our ancestors as they provided us with a pathway we have lost. We acknowledge our failure to comprehend and our efforts to defile the earth. We turn our attention to union, now, beginning with ourselves.   

We perceive how this works and how we work within it. We have returned now. We are home.  

TO THOSE WHO CAN'T BE WITH US, YET ARE - Maurice Possley

HOPING IT MIGHT BE SO - Shan Overton