That knot in your stomach. You know it. You feel it, too, don't you?
You feed it with worry and fretting about the future. Its favourite diet is 'might happens' and 'what ifs'. It ties itself tighter. It dyes itself deeper into darkness, knitting itself into a jacket with bristly threads. You try to unpick it with distractions. You try to cast off its stitches but the needles of denial keep clicking.
Suddenly your mind is spinning. You feel shipwrecked on a distant horizon. Life feels
remote and you picture yourself all alone, isolated, nervous, jumpy. Your hear an echo of your own helpless voice crying out, sobbing like you did as a child when you once felt abandoned and
anxious decades ago.
You come to the end of your rope. You creep, broken, into silence. You let your babbling mind relax. You shush it firmly as it warns and scaremongers. You're Mary Poppins closing the beak of her parrot-headed umbrella. When it starts to get the message, your mental chatter quietens its chuntering for a space. Just a space, so the silence can break through. Then the frantic little knot, the node of grief and anxiety, smiles at itself being gently acknowledged, and as your soul reminds itself of being one with all creation, you suddenly find
the knot itself has unravelled and lost its kinks and snarls. Under all the surface shimmer of dire imaginings, you get a peek at the solid ground underneath.
Then there is a wideness, humming with light. You know for certain the
truth that you are not floating in abandonment at all, but tenderly held,
perfectly still, in love and security of another kind – the peace that's beyond words, or images or concepts. It waits for you so humbly, while you clumsily juggle with your mind’s plunge into the past, as it tries to recall better times
while stopping off to rerun all the worst moments etched unhelpfully, obsessively,
in memory; while your thoughts pick nervously at the imagined emptiness of
the future, with that sense of undefined, vague and untouchable dread.
I hear from my heart: “I can't help with what you dread in
the future. I can only be here with you in this moment. Here we can deal with everything that is, together as one.”
So I choose to be here.
Not to ‘stay’ here, because change and impermanence is a given. We dread change too, don't we, when we make it into a choice, or link it to the uncertainty of the
future? No. I choose to be here. Only here and now is rock solid liquid reality.
Here I am beloved, with a love that is everywhere and everything, that is
refreshed to perfection every moment, before that perfection can fall away even for an instant. Only sometimes, when the knot makes itself felt inside, I lose sight of this still centre and I escape into the captivity of mind-buzzing
absence.
I've spent so many years of my life caught up in my mind's fantasies. The world of misery was always waiting when I came back to earth. Like so many others, I've walked through a featureless wilderness of illness during these past few decades. After an initial ‘my life is over!’
moment, when I became so ill, knees chopped from under me, unable to function from the illnesses that stalked me and ate me alive, I've reached a clearing.
Clearings give us a new perspective on the surrounding forest with its thickets of thorns and hidden pits. Now I am finding my heart somehow drawn
deeper and stiller than ever before. Nearer to silence's lucid clarity than I was, even in those active,
fervent years when I was free to serve, travel, and minister wherever I was called to be.
Nothing can quench that love at the very kernel of life itself. It never goes
out and far from abandoning us to grief and cynicism for ever, it waits inside
us till we can stop running and shouting and weeping for long enough to realise
it has always completely been with us, and within us.
True joy comes welling up. Never pushy, never strident. It's always waiting in the
background while the mind is doing its dread and loathing thing, fighting to get away
from the truth of eternity that never diminishes or fades away for a moment.
This morning’s headlines in the UK include medicine shortages even before
full Brexit at the end of the month after next. I could worry. I could whine. Perhaps I will, again! I've had enough practice! I could stress and resist and identify as poor little me, the hard done-by. But whenever I can summon up the insight not to, I refuse to. I'm unfriending that knot inside. I’ll let my imagination go on a hike, with its worst case
scenarios and its personal 'Project Fear'. I’ll be softly in my spirit in the silence, in the midst of it.
I'll be right here.
I'll be right.
