Perpetual Freedom

It has been going on several weeks now that I carry with me an inner calm. I have moments of traveling in thought to the past or future, and moments of fear, but when this happens a gentle voice pulls me back to the moment, to the present. I am practicing being in the now continually, and feel a presence about me the full of the day. I have a strong desire to be outside and in nature—to touch nature, to breathe in nature, to be one with the beauty of the world.

Yesterday, I sat outside and imagined the world of trees, how life might be as a tree. I was drawn into the green edges, the outlines, and pulled further in at the imaginary line where the green of the tree meets the blue of the sky. Such a lovely, lovely day it was, the blue of the sky the richest of colors. I sat there, in wonder, my mouth agape at the swirling colors that are between where the tree and sky meet, realizing they don’t actually meet at all, as there is no separation. I watched the beauty, recognizing all that I have been taught in how to see the world is being undone.

So much of who I am is the little child I used to be. Found again is the youthful innocent wisdom; as if effortlessly I’ve opened up a honeypot of yesterdays, all the knowledge I’ve collected through the centuries trickling down upon me. The blunders, the pillaging, the fallings, the woes—all of it pouring through, and with this, the stickiness itself, scouring and collecting the final residue within.

I cannot express this brilliance of being, nor will I attempt to do so. Yet, I have a strong impression I shall never be bored again. All around me the world appears reborn and renewed, and the presents that have always been present at last opened.

I no longer have extreme emotions. I no longer have lingering emotions, indeed. For as soon as they spike in degree, the observer I am, watching this mysterious play of life, steps in and erases the experience with a calmness divine. I now understand in depth most, if not all, of my journey, and am treated to painted images of grace-filled lessons throughout my waking and sleeping hours. There is no heightened need or want, or desire for anything. Outcomes are ceasing to exist. For with the coming of goals, or longing of any magnitude, I slip momentarily back into a state of pain, and recognize readily the need I once had for what would be leads only to the recognition of a finality that no longer exists.

My days are spent in gratitude. Everyone I meet a gift onto self—a self I know less and less about. A self that with each further step released, a new step is found. My need is for naught, my wishes for All. In this I have the calmness and stillness of the pond at the sunrise, the ripples evident of a spring day’s passing of gentleness and of wind asleep. I am the ripples and I am the pond, and all about the pond—the insects, the rocks, even the litter—for all seems purposeful and meaningful, and if not necessary, then accepted.

The calmness exists in my body. My being naturally following the rest. One blended into the next. The sound of hymns, the beauty of art, the eyes of a beloved, the start of a divine dip into nature, all leave me spellbound. Though, equally present. I am child returned onto master, and master retreated into the woods of before. Resting, as higher self, in some greater plane of non-necessity; the once imagined presence less displaced than returned to the phantom warehouse.

I understand why I was the way I was, and in thinking back, I hurt. In that when I travel here or there, or anywhere not directly now, my body is aware of the alignment shifted, and leaps back to the moment with such degree I am bolted or jolted, or at minimum steered with the reminder of what is.

I am at peace when I am not wondering in thought. I am at peace when I connect to what feels as source: a collective rush of pool of nothingness birthed somethingness. I am at peace when the voices I hear, that I have always heard, hush my thoughts to rest with the gentle: shhhhhhhh. I am at peace as the lessons are glided through me, as the gentle wind through the limbs of the willow. How I sway in the knowing, and reclaim my own lovely substance in the submission to the natural flow.

Tomorrow is no longer my concern, and to venture there seems illusion upon illusion. And the past equally thusly so. A past splattered in disarray and guessing, so thoroughly shifted from one reality to the next, that it is but phantom ghost revisited through phantom eyes. The queries of what is or what brings seems little of substance; the questions themselves somewhat wrapped in the outcome of nothing. I bend in this way, to the invisible of invisible, no less certain than determined, no less able than unable.

I am. And that is all. And beyond that, need I be erased, and all my trappings set free, then so be it. For I have collected nothing but imaginings: event upon event of interpretation and judgment.

I have been the scout of fantasy and mistress of pain.

I have placed my needs above All, and then watched as I crumbled in uncertainty and failure.

I have danced to be proclaimed, and then watched as my invisible dust scattered in non-recognition.

I have been this and that a billion times, each effort daunted, each need uncovered and devoured.

All I have been is for naught.

Everything done in an attempt to claim what is un-claimable.

All done in an attempt to unravel a beauty that was long forgotten.

Indeed, I was an empty present, with legs sprouted, and mind controlled, a zombie beyond zombie, unable to feed off of anything beyond the self-invented clinging-self.

I ate away at my own being in an attempt to be loved and cherished.

And here is where the pain came most truly: in the need to circumvent my own life to present myself as worthy.

How silly it seems now, that this distant traveler, brought down from the eons beyond reason, should think herself worthy in her dutiful neediness.

I was but siphon recognizing my invented self in another—all her frailties, her darkness, her unlit ways. I was the judge, the serpent, the demon made ripe, the inventor of my own game, and the gatekeeper to misery. I created a world in which I turned all against the one I be, trapped in a child’s game attempting to create the one I am not, into something grand and distinguishable.

How silly I be; how silly I am. Still clinging to some substance that breathes in the air of thankfulness.

I cannot express in words so limiting, and time so fleeting, how recognizable I am to self. How unrecognizable I am to no-self. How funny I seem in this garment called me, and how equally foolish in my tethered-thinking. To think I could feasibly know anything more than nothing, when I am nothing. I am nothing upon nothing upon nothing. And in this nothing is my perpetual freedom.