
In the evenings we gather
Near the tree
We sit in a circle
And listen to the stories
That the tree tells
Nobody talks
And we all cry
Because we love the stories
So much
And we love the way
It feels as if
Every story
Has its roots
In nothing.
In the evenings we gather
Near the tree
We sit in a circle
And listen to the stories
That the tree tells
Nobody talks
And we all cry
Because we love the stories
So much
And we love the way
It feels as if
Every story
Has its roots
In nothing.
All the colors stand around me, in bottles, tubes and pencils. They are looking quietly at what I do. What will I say? They are my audience now.
I love them. They can do infinite things. They do not really look. I know. It is the whole who looks. The infinite listening-with-the-heart. The heart-of-listening. His name is I.
When the light of seeing is bright and strong, everything that is non-transparent burns into non-existence. Its energy is left with no job. It gives itself back to be used for creation.
The name of the creator is I too.
It seems the light in the middle of the painting (the yellow and orange) is marred. It has been hit on the head.
Darkness (on the left) makes a threat. But the little child-who-flies is not afraid. He flies into the darkness to repair his past. He will find his love that he rejected in those old times. It is like the soul-retrieval that shamans do.
The goodness and the freedom-filled-joy, which is the lost part of him, will be found where it went to hide when it was not permitted to act in the world. It will be invited back and respected, loved, accepted, joined.
Again the lines tell the stories. The color shapes tell the emotions. The composition says that all is blessed, with all its tiniest details.
The white always looks with endless love and curiosity, with awe, with pride and marvel.
There is confusion there too, on the right, projecting a yes-no feeling.
The big yellow mother would like to say: Be careful!
But she knows that daring requires love and trust, and not carefulness. So she does not say a word. She admires her child.
#####
Yesterday in the morning I sat on the window seat and meditated. With all the lack of sleep that I collected, because of the pain, I fell asleep. I lost my balance and fell. I opened my eyes in the middle of the fall and saw the world turning around. But I was still asleep when my forehead hit the floor.
Then I woke up.
I felt fear and this conjured up memories from an event in my childhood, that now I saw more fully than before. Doors that were closed before, opened.
Fear cannot come if there is no story behind it. Falling cannot happen without a belief or a few beliefs that invite it. I know this is strange for some.
Mooji showed up in front of me, when I was going through videos to enjoy but I moved on every time. Now I stopped and let him speak. He is like an old friend that I love deeply. So my heart opens. What will he say now?
In everything that he says and in the way he moves, I feel that-infinite-space attending, just like my own one right now. I realize that I came to like the taste of this state. It starts to be familiar.
And he says that when a troublesome event comes up and we have a shock, a fear, or we are being shockingly and fearfully agitated, the thing to do is to find the quiet spot that is always there too, and go into this, stay in this.
And this is what this reminds me of:
When both of Segovia’s parents died and he was left alone in his world, he was some six years old, or maybe less. He was very sad, and I am crying for this sadness now because I feel some of it. Somehow there was someone there who knew what to do. He or she put Segovia (little Andre) on the train with all his belongings and sent him to his grandfather in another city.
Grandpa took him from the station and brought him home. For Segovia this was a strange person who he did not know. Grandpa sat Segovia on a chair and sat himself on another chair facing Segovia and in his hands he had his guitar. Segovia did not play guitar yet.
Grandpa made a chord.
Segovia cried.
Grandpa made another cord.
Segovia cried more.
And so they went. Grandpa played chords and Segovia cried, until Segovia smiled.
This was his introduction to his grandpa. And this is what brought the guitar to his life. And it was also his introduction to that different love that comes with insight and cannot be broken.
You see? Whatever life brought, whatever emotional response he had, he went to this direct-no-story effect of the sounds and this became his quiet spot. Maybe at first he did not even perceive the sweetness of the chord. Eventually he fell in love with it.
Maybe you do not immediately feel the huge, deeply joyful, childishly curious, absolutely peaceful character of the inner peace. But with many visits it becomes inevitable that the taste will come through. And there will be a sweet love that has just awakened in your heart, that will take you there again and again and it will be your home, the only place where there is no contradiction whatsoever between you and the place. And with no contradiction, you are the place and the place is you. And so it goes for everything.
(As for the story about Segovia, I hope it is close enough to the truth. I heard it on public radio long ago. The details may have been somewhat different but the core is true.)
Being tired and in pain I became sad. Pain is a simple thing but living with it creates additional problems. Now all of them weighed on me. I thought: I can’t go on like this any more. I did not even paint yesterday and today.
My friend from Germany called. We started to talk and the phone line went dead.
I pulled a new piece of paper onto the table, dipped the brush into the water and into the first paint that my eyes saw in the watercolor box. It was olive green. This is how I choose the first color.
And then there was the drawing. No time. No pain. Brush, water, paint and the composition, the story with no words. The energy of the truth. Everything is good.
The olive green lines and the white of the paper are the best of friends. It is a holy connection. The lines, strikingly, appearing out of the white. The white does not have inside and outside. It is everywhere. It is all-there-is-everywhere. Even the word everywhere does not fit here. Is the green line real? And my eyes that see it: are they real? And my heart that has just become so full and so delighted, what about it?
(The other colors came later.)
Now in a different way:
Pain is part of the illusion of life, together with the body, with time, with good and bad.
The true self cannot have pain. Its essence is joy. Its essence is love and playing and being curious. The true self cannot be affected by the illusion.
For the “I” in the illusion pain is real and hard.
The good thing is that everything is connected. All I need to do is to change the way I focus and switch my identity to the true I.
Instead of focusing on the pain and automatically trying to escape it, to fight it, to prevent it, to change it, Instead of these, I find my curiosity and make the olive green lines. I find my playfulness and play with everything that shows itself. I look for the beauty in everything and find it easily. I look for my joy and it is right there. I am joyful. I look for my love and indeed what else do I have? This is how I start to identify with the true self.
And as I do this, I find that I have forgotten the pain. I don’t even feel it. Or if I do, it is not significant. I am in peace. The vibrations of the pain, the waves that streamed through the legs calm down. My hands that clutched one foot fall down, relaxed. The body rests. The energy of creation flows flawlessly everywhere it has to go. The body heals. The specific thinking processes that hold on to the body and its suffering become weaker. I am not so dependent on the body and the world around it. I witness them and I am free. In my mind I am already walking down to town, where the galleries are. I am going to see an exhibition. Right foot, left foot and I dance.
One day before, according to the Gregorian calendar, I am 70.
A good friend asked me how does it feel, and I did not have anything special to say.
It feels like something lived in this body, that is never the same body, and this body is almost transparent, it is not real. It floats in endless space, which is full of life and interest. Things happened to it. There are many stories about it and they seem to be lined up in some complete version, but even in this version there are many parts that have been forgotten, or that have been told in different ways over the years.
More and more and more I want to feel the endless.
There is a source for all that is experienced now.
They have lights inside
At first they were ghost like
Moving in a haze
With intricate
Stories holding stories
Now with the colors
Every one of them
Has a light inside
And the ghost like walkers
Have a mission
That they blindly fulfill
They are blind in the thinking portion
Of themselves
But awake in a hidden place
From which they operate
Unknowingly
And do they really not know?
There is a lot of habitual readiness to continue living with pain, when your pain has been with you for years. There is even fear. How can I live without pain? What will my life be like? What was the protection that the pain gave me that now I will be without? There are many questions like this. But I do not want to go into them today. I have done it in the past. Today I am asking intuition: What do I have to feel, so that I can live without pain? How does life without pain look like, from feeling point of view?
And this is the answer in a drawing.
I am not even collecting words. The words are useful to discover stories and experience feelings. But this is feeling already. I am ready to feel it. In time it will create new stories that will fit this feeling.
I am hanging this drawing in a place where I can look at it a lot of times and every time I’ll see it, I’ll feel how I have to feel so that I can live without that old phenomena that I am letting go of now. I am moving from one illusion to another one that I choose now.
Yesterday
Deep under the surface
Are talking rocks
Telling stories
And elbowing each other.
In the sky
Three main bodies float
One is the way some parts of the whole
Stick together
Awaiting resolution
Another is the collection of cans and can’ts
The third is an angel
Who promises that the legs are good.
In the vast landscape
The rocks, the fields
And the hazy horizon
Consider everything they see
As the higher sky above it all
Smiles.
Today
Like teeth in an x-ray
With the roots that they send
Into the jaw
Like bubbles of air
Caught in pockets
Like doctors in white gowns
Or maybe angels
Arranging everything in the best way
With love and laughter
Like warmth
Like kindness
Like the way it has to be
And it is.
Like countries with wars and complications
And borders everywhere
Like lakes and yellow sands
And the big sea
Marred
But still blue
And deep.
Like maps
For the shapes of clothing
That will move in the air
While being held by our bodies
Walking on this earth
Talking with each other
Knowing that nothing has ever moved
But the mind.
Entries 1-58 show how I use the method of Intuition Through Art to heal myself from Peripheral Neuropathy.
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