Aliveness is seamless,
Its sensations and appearances interwoven
Impossible to separate one from another
You have to impose separation upon it
Artificially divide it
Into you and me
Right and wrong
Good and bad
Conditioning gives you preferences
Biology a deep sense for survival
But see
Where does your grief stop and love begin?
Was it ever gone?
Can it ever leave?
Isn’t love what pervades it all?
The feeling of interconnectedness and communion, but also of loss, of abandonment?
Can there even be loss and grief without love?
Aliveness is the fire that both warms and consumes
Tenderly lighting a cold winter’s day
Yet mercilessly burning down the house of memories and plans
Transience, a kiss of love and a kiss of death
Aliveness flows like water
Gentle rivers that nurture
Hidden springs that quench the thirsty
And somewhere a tsunami silently appearing out of nothing
Innocently flooding the fragile peace in the paradise of a Christmas holiday
With loss
Rewriting memory forever
And when the ground you believe to be so solid beneath your feet moves,
Unnoticed in its very depth,
where even your imagination cannot reach.
And when it surfaces, a fragment of your world collapses.
You desperately seek answers to explain this unfathomable
sometimes unbearable
aliveness
That sometimes comes as an ecstatic dance you never want to end,
Or a gentle breeze, softly embracing you.
And other times, as a devastating nightmare from which you long to awaken and escape.
Reason and cause, concepts you cling to,
Hoping they grant control and choice over life’s wild, unpredictable current of love and loss,
From which you perceive yourself as painfully separated
Alienated
From its beauty and marvel
Not seeing that separation is only a symptom of perception,
Which makes you and the other imaginary entities
Friends and foes, lovers and enemies.
And life a storyline of disconnected events and experiences,
Seeking completion, liberation
A new year that promises to leave the old behind.
Wishing to freeze the light, love and aliveness so they never move again
Away
Unity and liberation are all this
As all this
You are free already
As this
