Encounters with Mystery

On stillness and action and being enough

I’ve been feeling very stuck of late.  Like I’m sitting at the bottom of a stagnant pond, waiting for breath to come and propel me back to the surface.  Creating feels efforted. 

There’s an aimlessness to it all.

I sit, as I have learned to do, in the feelings that come.  Breathing, presencing it all.  Finding some small willingness to inhabit this space in which I find myself, to feel what it feels like to sit within the pond.  Hard as stone.

There’s anger here, it’s uncomfortable, I don’t much like it.  Still I breathe.

My mind wants very much for me to jump out of the pond.  Why are you still sitting here?  Why don’t you know what to do next?

The thoughts that come are more uncomfortable than the feelings, though made of the same stuff.

Take an action, any action.

It seems like good advice, though I feel it tinged with an edge of judgement welling up from some place within, telling me that the experience of being at the bottom of the pond, of where-I-am-right-now-as-I-am is in some way not enough.

But I do want, I do want, to be in the joy of the flow of creation again.  Re-immersed into the rush of wonder…

And so I take an action.  Even though I’m not feeling it, I’m not inspired, I sit at my creative table and I write.  I write about an idea I’ve had for some time, to hold online gatherings just dedicated to silence. 

Coming together in a noisy world and letting it all go at the door.  Allowing ourselves to be changed by the act of choosing no action.  No distraction.  Carving out space together and sinking into the waiting silent field, the foundational groundless heartbeat of everything. 

Silence is where change happens.

Silence is where change happens.

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I try and write it, this invitation to join me in silence.  The words fall heavy upon the page.  My body shakes in a stress response.  I ignore it.  Forcing it all.

I feel angry as I come to the end of the day.  Angry that I don’t know what I’m doing, that the path feels so hidden, full of unexpected turns, countless dead ends.  Angry that I can’t seem to see the difference between the true path ahead, the one that winds out into infinity, soul-borne, heart-opening, life-giving, and the encumbered dead end.

Where is the true path?  What am I truly feeling called to create?  What will bring me the most joy, allow my soul to rise, to sing and to soar?

I feel that I have no answers.

And then, as I move my way heavily through our evening routine, I feel a pull in my heart, a draw inside my tired body, luring me out into the garden and the fading evening light.  I dance awhile in the ‘maybes’, caught between the comfort of our everyday patterns and the desire tugging at me to step out into the night. 

Louder and louder the patient heart calls. 

And so at last I move outside, into the mystery.

Because this is what awaits me, out there in the night.  The waiting world, breathing itself in luminosity, swelled with its own darkening light. 

Perfectly still.

I lie myself down beneath the maple, back against the Earth, body to the sky.  Heart expanding, becoming the silence.

The bones of my spine anchor into the soil and I spread myself here, as the night sounds come, filling a vacuum which is not nothing, but everything.

For the first time in a long time, I am truly calm.

As I open my eyes to take in the sky, dusk-lit, growing into a love-breathed infinity, my heart opens into the God-Heart and I quietly dissolve into everything.

The leaves of the maple, deep silhouettes of green, the calling blackbird singing the turning into night, this resting body upon the Earth, the moth that flutters on the quiet salvias.  The luminous over-arc of the heavens.  Everything that turns in the stillness.

This earth-heart, absorbed by the wider God-Heart, expanding through the liquid cosmos, darkness and light and the shade of all things.

This is what it is to dwell in mystery.  To exist in the fabric of everything.

And I realise that I have forgotten it.  There was a time in my life – not-so-long-ago-at-all – when even the seeming-small actions I take now were impossible.  When the limitations of my deeply-ill body held me in permanent thrall.  And this was the time, when nothing could be done, that I began to open myself into the simple dwelling place of mystery.

Days upon days lived beneath this tree, under this sky, alive to the Life as it sparkled through my roses, through the soil, through myself.

I remember the awe-eyed wonder of resting my eyes upon the minute body of a translucent snail, slow-shifting its way along the green tower of a chive.  Held spellbound.

Every moment enough.

Here in the swelling God-Heart I remember. I remember at long last that my actions do not produce my value, or the value of my life. 

Here in earth-heart-God-Heart our value already is.

It already is.

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And so perhaps as I dwell inside this body in its early healing stages, seeking fraction by fraction to re-engage with the world, I can allow more space for the anger and for the stagnancy and all the dense clouds of energy that pour out of me as I rise slowly towards the surface.

Because I am here, alive again to the living of mystery, sitting and writing in my garden, my eyes resting upon the dew cresting and crowning the leaves of my roses, in love with the sunlight as it falls through the shadows of the dying ash tree onto the tender grass.  The little pollinators humming their life-song to the white oregano flowers beside me, lifting their clear voices in return.

All of us singing.

So when you don’t know what to do, when the anger overcomes you, when everything seems broken and all muddied by the lost, follow that heart-pull. 

Just listen; it will find you.

And then follow its call, out into the night. Rest yourself in the waiting silence.

Listen, just listen for the vibrant chorus of everything, the singing soul-life twining through all things.  As you grow quiet, lost in the miracle of it all, you’ll hear the answering hum from your own body, your own soul, your own expanded heart.

Already enough.

Endlessly one in the Mystery.

And together we’ll remember: this is salvation.

Miranda x

P.S. I poured all this love of earth and tree and soul and cosmos into my most recent yoga nidra meditation, ‘Into Timelessness’; listen here on the premium version of Insight Timer. Or try my newest free recording, here, called ‘Spirit, Move Me’, a mantra-based meditation for opening to transformation.

P. P. S. Perhaps one day I’ll find the flow to begin offering these online silence gatherings. If that calls to you, subscribe below and stay connected.