The stillness of Presence while the whole world is on fire!
My day was yesterday when the previous week had been a calamitous time for our wider Los Angeles community - walking the dog and watching the smoke of fires as ash rained down like snow. I share a reflection and an appropriate reading - Naked. Unarmored. Curious. Courageous. Now.
For this time of anguish in fire-ravaged Los Angeles (Lost Angels), an important quote from Matter & Desire - An Erotic Ecology by Andreas Weber - "Laughter is joy in the fact that there will always be a way, that it is beautiful to be real. Laughter arises when a spark of life has been recognized, saved, kindled, and passed on. Laughter arises from the joy of experiencing that beauty has its own power to exist. That it asserts itself. That it sustains. That it greets me. That it recognizes me. That I recognize it also. That I am able to see into its eyes, into the eyes of the water lilies with their alluring center of pistils and stamen, of innocent male and dreamy female sex organs, into the curious eyes of the ducks, into the calm eye of the lake itself, which welcomingly opens its watery mirror to the hesitant heavens. Happiness is a tangible essence in space. It is cool and green and transparent and it caresses and carries me, so long as I don’t do anything to prevent it. I just have to go on breathing. I don’t have to do anything.
And I also understood that love is an act of truly encountering an other, a willing engagement of the self whose first action is to risk its own skin. Diving into the lake between wild mint and sorrel and feeling the water. Taking the lake gently in your hands and letting it run between your fingers. And this practice of love means always accepting and even desiring what is, means being healed by being accepted, and this acceptance is, of course, also painful, and yet this pain is so minor when compared with the birth that accompanies it, or rather: The pain is perhaps immense and unending, but it is offset by the fact that its other is birth—birth that comes from being desired—and it is good, even if it is only the tiniest imaginable birth to balance out all of the world’s pain, because that which is born is desired and wished for and loved by eyes that say: Be. Yes, this feels right. Coherent. In thought, in the throat, in the stomach, in the pores of the skin. It feels right, now and for always. And it is good this way. Even if it hurts. Even when the doors open, close—irreversible. After that—the unknown. Death. The eternal beginning. The “always in never.” A summer evening. A spark of the endless summer, of the world’s summer essence that is always there, in your gaze, in my laugh. Oh yes, and this must then be how God tries to do it—we have all been present to it at least once. Now, at the culmination of this evening hour, in the complete nakedness of the world, it is so easy to understand. And yet it takes so long before this effortlessness is finally remembered. And allowed. It is no different. Never more planned, more protected, more professional, more hardened. Never less happy. It is just a step, a pause, a turn: There it is, within me, the happiness that does not belong to me alone, but to the world. I was born with it, I recognize it again, it was there at the beginning, the cells’ feeling of amazement that they should possess so much beauty that they would multiply and combine into something ever greater. The newest amazement at the world’s oldest matter-of-course: to be able to become greater and more beautiful and to feel the desire to share greatness and beauty with open hands, to be present to the invisible spark that is the center and the whole, to be the spark itself. I was born with this—you, too. All of us. It is, in fact, the energy with which every birth is conceived. It is the thing that pushes us into life, the deep inside that has no form and no name and that yearns and also confidently knows that this yearning is insatiable and will therefore always be revived anew, no matter how devastating death and breakdown was. And is. And will be. Naked. Unarmored. Curious. Courageous. Now."
Andre
Thank you.