To all my witches, wizards, pagans, wiccans, lightworkers, and nature worshipers!
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Communion: The Wholeness of Attention
by Ariel Spilsbury
Spring is the season when we naturally feel like skipping, singing, sauntering, savoring.
First Love (excerpt)
Denise Leverton
It was a flower
suddenly
there was Before I saw it, the vague past,
and Now. Forever.
Nearby was the sandy sweep of the Roman Road,
and where we sat the grass was thin.
From a bare patch of that poor soil, solitary,
sprang the flower, face upturned,
looking completely, openly into my eyes.
I was barely old enough to ask
and repeat its name.
'Convulvulus,' said my mother.
Pale shell-pink, a chalice
no wider across than a silver sixpence.
It looked at me, I looked back,
delight filled me as if
I, not the flower,
were a flower and were brim full of rain.
And there was endlessness.
Perhaps through a lifetime what I've desired
has always been to return
to that endless giving and receiving,
the wholeness of that attention,
that once-in-a-lifetime
secret communion.
This
poem describes the nature of what it is to live continually in this
state, often called being a Mystic...which is to have a "wholeness of
attention" that is endlessly giving and receiving simultaneously. The
closest word I know to describe this state is communion. Becoming
apparent "otherness," being one with it until it reveals its ecstatic
delight in simply being a part of the creation!
In
our over-busy,
facing-away-from-the-present-moment-looking-down-button-pushing, hamster
wheel society, taking time for such communion is made to seem
pointless, time 'consuming' and utterly frivolous. That could not be
further from the truth, at least if one intends to be AWAKE in the
ecstasy of this creation! In the very process of being empty (without
thought) enough to BE in a state of communion with life, the juicy
inspiration and inexplicable ecstasy which actually gives life meaning,
somersaults joyfully into us, laughing as exuberantly as a two year
old...
And for no reason
I start skipping like a child.
And for no reason
I turn into a leaf
That is carried so high
I kiss the Sun's mouth
And dissolve.
And for no reason
A thousand birds
Choose my head for a conference table,
Start passing their
Cups of wine
And their wild songbooks all around.
And
For every reason in existence
I begin to eternally,
To eternally laugh and love!
When I turn into a leaf
And start dancing,
I run to kiss our beautiful Friend
And I dissolve in the Truth
That I am.
~Hafiz
As we are actually an intrinsic part of nature (rather than
separate from it), Spring is the season when we naturally feel like
skipping, singing, sauntering, savoring...the fullness of life
scintillating through our veins like champagne bubbles making us giddy
for no reason. It takes a lot of personal will and cultural programming
to keep us choosing to focus entirely on "work," rather than, even for
moments, communing in the wholeness of our attention, with existence, in
the form of a hummingbird outside our window, or the bacchanalian sound
of honeybees wildly celebrating with their tambourines in a rosemary
bush, or the delicious feeling of sun licking wintery cold from our skin
and psyches.
So in this Turn of the Divine Wheel of Time, this acupuncture point of Spring Equinox, I invite you to take time to consciously COMMUNE AND CELEBRATE WITH ALL LIFE that we are in fact alive and awake in the creation!
Where does the real poetry come from?
From the amorous sighs
In this moist dark when making love
With form or Spirit.
Where does poetry live?
In the eye that says, "Wow-whee"
In the overpoweringly felt splendor
Every sane mind knows
When it realizes.. our life dance
Is only for a few magic seconds,
One bloom of a rose,
From the heart saying,
No Shouting..
"I am so damn
ALIVE!"
~Hafiz
In this moist dark when making love
With form or Spirit.
Where does poetry live?
In the eye that says, "Wow-whee"
In the overpoweringly felt splendor
Every sane mind knows
When it realizes.. our life dance
Is only for a few magic seconds,
One bloom of a rose,
From the heart saying,
No Shouting..
"I am so damn
ALIVE!"
~Hafiz
Wherever you find yourself
this Spring Equinox, gather your beloveds to commune and simply
celebrate that we are alive and awake!! For those fortunate to be in
the Bay area, we will be wildly celebrating Spring Equinox. Come join us
in the revel of Spring shouting out and amplifying our joy! From one
who is savoring the "end of the somersault" of this life dance, I invite
you to celebrate the preciousness of this life with me!!
Your sister in Delight, Ariel
