The Ruined Church

Close to where I live there is an old abandoned Protestant Church. It is known only because of its imposing tower that hides behind a stand of trees and a boundary wall of well-ordered stones surrounding the old churchyard. It sits atop a small hill.

At one time there would have been a bell that would toll to call people to remember. That bell has fallen silent.

Each time I pass this high tower hidden among woods I remember the following poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Sometimes a Man

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors and keeps on walking
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East
and his children say blessings on him as if he were dead


And another man, who remains inside his own house
dies there, inside the dishes and glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward the same church which he forgot.



This poem, of course, is not about simply going to church or finding some religious group that you belong. It is about following your longing for the true Self that arises in each and every moment.



This old Protestant church is in ruins but the poem a bout what a man (or a woman) sometimes does is find what St. Paul termed a church made without hands. Outside that ruin where the bell no longer tolls and where the boundary wall is the boundless is the bell that is always ringing.



When you follow the call of that church made without hands you give the gift of blessing the world. You gift the world what it is you are here to be – not necessarily what you think you are here to do. Being precedes doing. The man who remains inside his own house is the man who has built a self-image that he tried to hold onto despite all that he feels he is called to be. Inside that image his imagination dies and this impacts on whose living in his orbit.



It is left then for the children to do what the father (or mother) refused to be – to go out into the world, often far out into the world of exile and abandonment in order to find that missing centre of the sacred within themselves.



In this poem a man stands up. He is willing to take a stand for what is calling him to become all that he is. When he takes this stand he goes eastward toward the rising of the sun, toward the place of new beginning, toward the dawn of the new day. He keeps walking. He keeps moving. Movement is a sign that there is still life flowing through him.



Each and every thing can become an invitation to your wisdom heart and mind. This invitation comes not simply in words but in symbols and paradoxes that touch your life. Creation is always in conversation with you but it does not speak in words. It speaks in metaphor. This is a language that has been forgotten by many people.



It is the most beautiful of languages that illustrates great poetry. We all know this because most all of us at ‘threshold times’ in life turn to poetry to try and give meaning to our deep human experience.



This old church reminds me of what is forgotten and that I also so often forget. I too often die among the dishes and the glasses, fretting about what I haven’t done or what is yet to be done. I have forgotten the sacred place within myself that arise in the eternal moment and gives me peace.



In writing about this old church I could tell you facts about how long ago people last worshipped here. You would have more information but the experience would not invite you to remember and reconnect to what is holy and what is sacred and complete within you. Facts about this old ruin will not bring you alive the way that the invitation to what the church represent can and is intended to invite within you.



The tower that remains is a square tower. Churches are built around what is called sacred geometry and squares are key aspects. The square is a universal shape and considered a foundational shape. It allows for solid bases.



I contemplate and am reminded how the sacred has fallen silent within me and within this land of Erin. At this time of writing, Erin is bankrupt, an outer sign of an inner poverty, and a sign of loss of real meaning. Our leaders have died amidst the dishes and glasses. They have left it for future generations to go far out into the world, the exiles that we as a nation are so good at producing.



So I hope that you might have fun with a new idea. Become a metaphor hunter. On one day let some object speak to you as a metaphor for what is important to the engagement with what is whole and what is holy in you. Let me assure you that this is a wonderful thing to do. The more you do it the more interesting your days become.



This allows your heart and mind to being to awaken to the way that creation created you to be and to become. Each day then becomes a holy day, a day when you venture to a space within yourself where you have never been before. The beauty of this practice is that you begin to come home to the beauty of who you are. You begin to see in ways that will enchant you.



Then you will be able to have a real holiday experience everyday you choose. You can make a stand and walk into the story of a holy present life in love with the creation you are so that you do not die amongst the limitation of an image you create and that is often in fear of ruin.



© Tony Cuckson 2010

Laughing all the Way to Eternity

When I travelled in India for a year in 1979 I met with many teachers. One I remember well. I met him in Rishikesh where there were many ashrams by the banks of the River Ganges that flows down from the Himalayas. He was somewhat of an enigma. I don’t know how old he was but by the look of his skin he could have been a child. The clothing he wore was simple, radiant, orange cotton fabric. It never seemed to have a crease in it. He slept in a home no bigger than a large frame tent and it was always tidy and the dust of an Indian summer seemed not to cross the threshold of his little home.



He seemed to be what I now refer to as one of the beautiful people. He knew and understood time in a very different way that manifested in a body of a man older than myself but as young as a child. One other thing about him that struck me was his laugh. He laughed as if he needed to be heard in New Delhi, which was sixty miles away. I think that laugh that skin, those clothes that ironed themselves were a kind of teaching that my heart wanted to know and he that knowing.


After all I had come to that land to find again what I had lost. I had been given to know the radiance that I AM but lost it when I began to use it to get what I wanted in the world. When I asked if I could be his disciple he said no he wouldn’t teach me. He said in no uncertain manner that I was too arrogant to learn and that I already thought I knew too much. At the time I felt hurt by what he said and his words have always been a sore point.


I think that masters, and I think he was a master by his presence and radiance – childlike, innocent, and playful but also faithful – encourage the seeker this way. The seeker sees manifest before their eyes the beauty of the divine in form. This was a beautiful man with dark skin contrasted against his orange robe with a radiant aura.


His response to me was similar to receiving what is called a Zen slap. It has been a reminder for me to stop and ask myself questions about my own propensity to arrogance. This is important because the kind of revelation that graces a seeker when the light flows through them contains the quality of certainty. Friends down the years have assured me that I am the most arrogant of people. This is, I think, because I do not compromise on what grace has been good enough to allow me to be the knowing of.


As I get older I no longer enter debates about knowing what it is people ask me that I know. As I get older there is a sense of myself becoming younger. What becomes important is not debate ‘about’ but presence that arises from contemplative silence. This then moves as love in action with the intention of alleviating suffering. This moment of love in action is beyond ‘doing good.’


I am not against doing good but doing good that does not arise from the Goodness of Being is laden with all kinds of karmic attachment. There is absolutely the need to alleviate suffering in all its forms. Yet the surest way to do this is to invite the one who suffers to feel and live from that which knows no suffering. This is part of the great Bodhisattva vow. The Bodhisattva is one who having attained enlightenment they vows to return through many lifetimes to alleviate the suffering of all sentient beings knowing that at the level of non-dual consciousness all suffering is an illusion.


When I hear spiritual gurus teaching that suffering is an illusion I balk at their language. I think there are different kinds of levels to enlightenment. I suspect that some teachers, while cognitively enlightened, are emotionally in the dark. It does not help to tell people who are in deep suffering that their suffering is illusory. To me this is true spiritual arrogance.


It is different when you sit and be with someone suffering and consciously be with them while keeping an aspect of yourself detached and available to the source of infinite love manifesting in all forms and loving all forms into existence. Detachment here does not mean an absence of feeling but the absence of attachment to a feeling as being able to define who in truth you are. In this way you plug into the ‘national grid’ rather than recharging from your personal limited battery of ideas and positions on what it is to suffer or how it is to be healed.


So I remember my meeting with the Master in Rishikesh with affection. He wounded me in part. It happens. Masters are not perfect human beings, even enlightened ones. Perfection is a limited idea that is dualistic and enlightenment is a state of non-duel consciousness and unlimited. The boundlessness of love is not so limited. This is why it is important not to engage in judgement. Judgment is always dualistic. Master Jesus referred to this as the Law rather than the spirit, which is never rigid.


Many people spend their whole lives clinging to heavy moralistic Laws and consequently lock the doors to Presence. You will be graced if you meet with anyone in form who informs you through their presence. They offer you the glimpse into who you truly are. This is a great grace for both those who give and receive of this presence.


This happened around the person who became St. Benedict. It happened around the person who became known as St. Francis of Assisi. It happened around the person who became Ramakrishna. It is happening now. People go and hang out with these people because they radiate what the heart of the seeker intuits. They have the perfume of the eternal permeating their body, mind and spirit. This perfume is that which cannot be bought for any price and by any action but paradoxically right action is needed to connect to its beyond sensational experience.


Masters can get attached to the way their tradition honours the disciple/teacher relationship. Sometimes, as it did in my case, with that childlike old man in Rishikesh, there is a clash of cultures where one party is attached to a particular idea of teaching or transmission as dialogue while the other utilises the method of surrender and humility.


I am arrogant in the sense that I have fidelity to and trust the inner voice given to me through grace. I am one connected to the stories of Irish mythology. In my Irish tradition this voice would be held within the story of the Stone of Destiny. This stone screams my true name when I am seen as the rightful King of Ireland who is required to protect the sovereignty of the sacred land of Erin.


To claim oneself as the sovereign lord of Erin appears to be the height of arrogance? Yet from a mystical point of view this is exactly what takes place within the heart of the seeker who sincerely and humbly wills to be an instrument of the divine. They surrender their will to allow the arising of their unique Kingship that expresses through the body (the metaphor here being the Land of Erin).


This is not arrogance. It is the willingness to allow the light that birthed you into the light to be seen on the high hill of non-dual consciousness. It is willingness to be the voice of Love you have been created to be. Paradoxically, it is the height of arrogance to think that you are NOT this, and that you are in any way apart from or could ever be separate from this.


I do not regret meeting with this old Indian version of a Tir Na Nog child/man with his Passionate Presence. When I think of him I see his skin, his bright eyes and saffron robe and I hear him laugh his laugh all the way to eternity. Bless him!

I am a Happy Drummer

"I am a happy drummer."

These are the words that came out of a rhythm that we played within our drumming circle one Sunday summer’s evening. These words, for me, seem to fit perfectly with one of the rhythms that mingled with two others that were being played.

I have learned to march to the sound of my own drum. It is what makes me not so much happy as centered. When we do not follow the march that is more a dance then we are more easily thrown off centre. Being centered gives you a peace that is more practical than happiness.

Happiness is always moving into unhappiness just as unhappiness is moving into happiness. None of these states last. They are, as the Dalai Lama has rightly pointed out, inherent in each other. Being centered gives you a sense of contentment. Contentment is more restful.

In the American constitution there is the given right to pursue happiness. I think the founding fathers might not have fully thought out the implication of those words. The pursuit of happiness is anything but happy. It can become the very thing that takes you away from the happiness that is inherent in creation.

What if you were to stop pursuing happiness or pursuing the future or simply stop? What if, in stopping this pursuit of an imaginary future in which the idea of happiness was attained, you simply let it be? What if, in letting it be, you found something that gave you more than you could ever be happy with?

What if you stopped all the rush into a kind of conceptual or virtual future – that you stopped and were willing to become a still point center in which you become the knowing of Love.

To know that you are the center point of Love that is never born nor ever dies takes you beyond the duality of happiness/unhappiness. It is that still point centre that is an awareness that at the center there is stillness, there is peace, while all around you there may be turmoil.

A soul friend will tell you that you will become happier as a consequence of learning the practice of centering. This happiness arises not because you pursue it but because it is a kind of perfume. It is the perfume of your real Self.

Any practice will do. This is where you learn to march to the sound of your own drum so that you become a happy drummer – or more to the point, that happiness arises within you and not as a consequence of your pursuit and achievement of some goal.

The important aspect of the practice is commitment. I practice writing. I practice gardening. I practice prayer. All of these for me are part of my happy drummer rhythm. I feel much less centered when I miss these practices. I become what I call my inner drama queen. I live a life not of contentment but inner drama, which always manifests as outer drama. I am not proud of this drama queen display but I try to be kind to her when she appears.

What ensures that, for the most part, that the drama does not arise, is practicing writing, gardening and praying. Any of these practices work for me. You could practice yoga, Pilates, or meditation. What is most important is doing any practice is the intention.

A soul friend invites you to make the intention for the highest good of all. This is intelligence. This is alignment with reality. This is attunement of you small drum, which is always connected to the one sound. This makes rational sense and leads into what is beyond sensational.

Creation made you a human being. This word human means the sound of God. or ,if you prefer, the sound of Love. Here, God does not imply any gender. You are a unique sound in the mind of God, who is the endless becoming. The degree to which you experience lace of peace is the degree to which you forget how to be the play of this unique sound.

Despite my propensity for being a drama queen I am, for the most part, a happy drummer. Each morning I write out my intention. This allows me to feel centered. I have created a life style in order to allow me to do this. I have created time in order to allow this being the sound of Love in form to be the most important rhythm I am here to resound.

In that sense, while others might judge me poor, I am in relation to my soul a resounding success. I am playing my unique sound of intention that expresses in form. This is the meaning of the words in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

I am a happy drummer to the extent that I listen and feel the way that the sound of Creation wishes to move through me. To that extent, like the drum that I play in my community drumming circle, I have to be empty. I have to be still and be willing to know the will of Love.

The pursuit of happiness is only that. The movement is a pursuit. You cannot chase what is arising out of the moment. Happiness is a paradox. When you are truly happy you disappear. You allow creation to express is unique way of expressing through you. Like the emptiness that is at the center of the drum there is infinite possibility. All you have to do is allow that master drummer called Creation to play you in the way it intended that it play you.

In this allowing there is no pursuit. It is the meeting of the lover and the beloved and the sound that arises is the sound of Love in form moving as Love in action for the highest good. This isn’t simply happiness but the experience of joy – joy in your true self.

So I am off to the Benwiskin Center outside Sligo to become a happy drummer in theRuach Rhythms community drumming circle.  There by the fireside I will tell stories, sing songs and centre myself into that placeless place where I know I AM always and forever a happy drummer

I Hear the Waters Lapping

              The Bathers – George Russell (AE)

“I will arise and go now
for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping
With low sounds by the shore.”

From - The Lake Isle of Innisfree
By W. B. Yeats

These lines from the poem Lake Isle of Innisfree are for this Irish storyteller an inspiration. It is told that later in his life the poet W. B. Yeats had certain regrets at having written this poem. I have no such regrets.

These lines are the invitation from the mystic heart – the heart that has glimpsed and wishes to return to the Source.  This is the return to the Source that the writer Marianne Williamson writes about in her book entitled “Return to Love.”

In the opening lines of this Lake Isle of Innisfree poem the hero of this poetic journey makes the commitment when he/she says, “I will arise…”  This is not just a poem about a sentimental attachment to a part of Ireland where the poet had lived. I think that is how many people view this poem and why W.B Yeats came to dislike being associated with it. Yeats didn’t write from sentimentality. He wrote from the consciousness of one connected to the timeless and its glorious invitation.

The phrase, "I will arise" indicates the proper usage of will in the development of raising consciousness and its expansion into the higher realms of timeless Love. This is an arising that is also a deepening into the heart’s core.  Then comes the phrase, "and go now." This relates to the poet’s understanding of the nature of time as a window that frames the timelessness of the present moment – the NOW.

When you look at the nature of time you find that the only time there is, is the present moment – the eternal now. When you think about the past you think about the past in this moment. When you plan the future you plane the future NOW. When the future arrives it arrives in the now. Time is a construct that developed with the clock; the clock came into its own with the advent of railways. In this sense we got more and more tied to clock time and now many of us experience what has been termed ‘time poverty.’

When you make your will the willingness to be a servant of the real  then time becomes a living presence? Are you willing or are you wilful? Are you pushing yourself to become what you have been told you should become in order to achieve what is defined in this world of time as success?

The line, "I will arise and go now," is an affirmation to be the willing servant of Love. This means paying attention to the water lapping. Most of us do not have this luxury. The only water we get close to is the stagnant pond of deep self-interest and the pursuit of what the Master Jesus called ‘the dead burying the dead.’

A soul friend invites you to hear the waters lapping by the shore of the timeless. There you will have some peace. There, for a short time, you will have some peace fill your beautiful eyes and the radiance from those eyes will truly reflect your soul and its Source.

W.B. Yeats was aware of this timeless connection to the shore of the timeless. He heard the water calling always ‘night and day.’ However, to enter the water one needs to move beyond the duality of night and day, light and dark, good and bad. This is why the invitation ‘Judge not that ye be not judged’ is such an important spiritual practice.

The great Islamic mystic poet Jelaluddin Rumi says it this way:

There is a field out beyond
Right doing and wrong doing
I’ll meet you there.

This is the field, the quantum field beyond time and space and form where you can meet and say, “I see you” because you will be one who sees through their beautiful eyes.  You will be a seer with the eyes of a lover reflecting the absolute beauty of Oneness.

To be this willing is to arise and move in the world of time as a manifestation of love in action. "I will arise and go now," requires intention and commitment. In my article "7 Ways to a Wonderful Life," intention and commitment equate with purpose and passion. This willingness is not to be confused with wilfulness, which I liken to pushing the river. What is required is what is a more feminine approach. It is the approach where you allow the dance of Creation to do you rather than you ‘doing’ it. For all our doing we have got ourselves and the planet in the proverbial ‘do-do.

You are a human ‘being.’ The word human translates as ‘the sound of being in form.’ This sound is the sound of Love. You can learn to hear it but to begin to hear it you have to also begin to trust it and allow it to do its creative work through you.

In so allowing you will arise and go into the eternal now and out of this direct experience there is the knowing of the timeless radiance you are. You arrive on the shore beyond the night and day of your life and stand on the solid ground of the shore beyond time.

To find out more about how to arise and go now register you interest in our Deep Heart’s Core Workshop, which includes singing, ‘around the fire’ storytelling, drumming, dancing and community contact

Tony Cuckson
storyteller@tonycuckson.com

or

Debbie Beirne at
ruachrhythms@gmail

Blessed are the Peacemakers

It is Sunday morning and this cottage is filled with a deep stillness for which I feel deeply blessed. I sit with pen in hand relaxing on the sette looking out at what are called the Iron mountains where it is told that the beautiful people, the Tuatha de Danaan first arrived in what would be called the land of Erin.

This week peace activists are getting shot by others who would protect what they consider to be their homeland from those they see as terrorists in the guise of peace makers.

I would that I, in the words of St. Francis of Assisi, “be an instrument of thy peace. The problem being that this I, this little me, am the very resistance to that harmony and instrumentation

I would that I become a peace activist but in so many ways the more I wish for this peace the more reactionary I become. In the greatest of mystical texts I am told that peacemakers will inherit the earth. This inheritance is not of the earth as something that I get but as the realisation of love in matter, love as mother, love as mother earth.

This prospective peacemaker knows (I have no intention of being arrogant in this respect) that most peace activists do not know and thus cannot live peace. Peace in the way I mean it here is not simply the absence of conflict but is a state of being that lives from the direct experience of Oneness.

The state of our world is the reflection of our collective inner relationship to life as we think it is to be lived. The primary conflict that contributes to this non-peace is the sense that we are individually separate. In this respect we are each and every one of us fundamentalists. The idea of separateness, living in a body in time and space is the idea of someone living in terror of non-existence. We ignore this aspect of life and thus we live in ignorance. We live in labels and concepts and false identification with nation state, with political affiliation, with race and any other label you care to name.

To be a peacemaker or rather a peace creator one needs to directly experience that peace that is beyond the dual nature of human existence. In each and every moment each and every one of us eats of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Peace begins to start dropping slow when we learn to sustain ourselves from the Tree of Life.

This is radical peace activism. It at least understands the nature of duality and the process of activity and reactivity. It understands the law of cause and effect. It understands the nature of time and the nature of miracle – an event outside of time. Thus one becomes and instrument of peace as a radiant emptiness out of which radical Love in action arises. This does not change circumstances alone but changes ones relationship to ones brother. One recognises sacred unity at the heart of creation and thus one’s brother is not a separate being but a note played within the eternal.

I am a rather poor peace activist. I wish to be an instrument of peace but the notes I play are not in harmony with the universal song. I know when they are and I know that with intention this harmony radiates out beyond the limitation of time and space and impacts those who are open to receiving this unconditional harmonic.

It is the same effect that meditators have on crime in major cities when they raise the group consciousness of the collective. It is called morphic resonance. You begin to resonate peace without judgement and simply become a sound wave that invites other sound waves to resonate with it. It is the really great way of feeling attractive.

You can do this every day as a peace activist. This way you begin to clean up your internal oil spill that you project out into the world unto the other. You begin to expand borders, you begin to sense the peace that passeth beyond the duality of good and bad. You become you own little flotilla of infinite possibility.
Some will say that I have not lifted a hand to help those in need. However, without a mind in harmony with the Source action is often simply reaction and not the movement of Love in action. Peace activism is much needed. It is to be much respected. Radical peace activism is the deeper awareness of what creates disharmony in the first place – the primary sense of individuality and separateness from existence.

So I invite the willingness to become an instrument of thy peace and leave the plan of action to that still small voice within. Then I surrender my need to make it all alright. Behind the veil of separateness that is the major cause of brother fighting brother there is the deeper primacy of life as Oneness. This Oneness was never born and never dies. It creates for the joy of creation. To live in this primacy of Oneness is to be an instrument of they peace and to live as Love in action.

This is the vision of this peace activist who would be willing to be an instrument of thy peace.

Rhythms of the Earth Celebration

Rùach Rhythms presents

"Rhythms of the Earth.

Celebration of Duir Oak wisdom"

"Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven" - Rabindranath Tagore

The oak speaks to us of strength. It invites us to feel grounded and celebrate our connection to the earth. We can then take this strength and sense of being connected into our day to day living. In this way we can spread our arms wide and connect earth and sky.

The oak is long lived and invites us to remember the beauty of our timeless nature and our connection to the state that we in Ireland refer to as the Land of the Forever Young.

Come and enjoy the celebratory experience of drumming within a circle of people trusting the inner wisdom that gives them strength of direction. Included with this experience you will enjoy the following:-

Storytelling around the fire that connects you of the wisdom that is within you.
A sense of fun and celebration of the rhythm of your life.
Singing in a circle and around the fire that reminds you that life wants to sing through you.
A real sense of community, hospitality and support.
This weekend workshop allows you to take time out and celebrate your innate wisdom.

TIME and PLACE

Start Time: Friday, June 18th, 2010 at 6:30pm End Time: Sunday, June 20th, 2010 at 11.00 am

 Location is the Benwisken Centre near Sligo. Dormitory accommodation and vegetarian meals will be provided. Drums will be provided.

COST

Cost including vegetarian food and dorm accommodation is €160.00. Concession is €120.00 on a sliding scale of ability to pay.Booking contact

Debbie on 087 6326610 or 094 9860495

or email

ruachrhythms@gmail.com
With Blessings

Prayer for Overcoming Indifference

I watch the news, God. I observe it from a comfortable distance. I see people suffering, and I don't lift a finger to help them. I condemn injustice but I do nothing to fight against it. I am pained by the faces of starving children, but I am not moved enough to try to save them. I step over homeless people in the street, I walk past outstretched hands, I avert my eyes, I close my heart.

Forgive me, God, for remaining aloof while others are in need of my assistance.

Wake me up, God; ignite my passion, fill me with outrage. Remind me that I am responsible for Your world. Don't allow me to stand idly by. Inspire me to act. Teach me to believe that I can repair some corner of this world.

When I despair, fill me with hope. When I doubt my strength, fill me with faith. When I am weary, renew my spirit. When I lose direction, show me the way back to meaning, back to compassion, back to You. Amen.

?Rabbi Naomi Levy

Healing the Family - Part I

A storyteller, and we are all storytellers, honours their family history. This does not mean they have to like their family history but that you give your intention and attention to learning how to create from it. You create from that history something worth honouring, not only for yourself but also through the whole spectrum of the individual to the universal.

In my own family there is a history of a certain kind of disease. It is a disease of the eyes. It is called glaucoma. It is a disease of the eyes that in days of old, and even with today?s medical science ultimately leads to blindness. Genetically, I carry this potential because both my parents had glaucoma that, in the later stages of their lives required medical treatment. Their parents before them carried this genetic code that was created from a resistance to a way of seeing.

As many of you who listen and read the articles I write I am drawn to a certain kind of vision. This is a way of seeing that is the way of a real storyteller, the way of a true bard, the way of a true schanachie. I am interested in my family history for the reason of wholeness and healing. While the sins of the father might be visited upon the children this need not always be the case. If the light of consciousness is brought to that which lives as unease and disease in the psyche then healing happens or can be a happening.

In the best selling book entitled, ?You can heal your life,? by Louise L. Hay she writes about the eye disease called glaucoma in this way.

?Stony unforgiveness. Pressure from longstanding hurts. Overwhelmed by it all.?

Louise Hay tells us in her book that the antidote to this eye disease casual by pressure behind the eyes is to see with love and tenderness. Or as the mystic Hafiz invites to learn to live with a full moon in each eye and to speak from such vision. The antidote is to speak from a vision that will allow others who are longing to be a vision of Love in form to hear what can be a real vision.

Here is something that I as a storyteller, the teller of my personal life story, am directly connected to. I know this connection through the definition give by Louise Hay. I know this connection through the longing for Love and tenderness and the longing to be able to express in this way.

I can see the pressure from long standing hurts and stony unforgiveness mirrored in my father?s life. I can see the over whelmed by it all experience in the life of my mother. So what do you do with this encoded message within one?s personal DNA? Well, you can fight it or you can transform it. When you fight it you are in effect dishonouring it. When you transform it you are in effect honouring the way the story of Love has informed your immediate family. In this way you become a healer and what it means to be a real storyteller.

As a storyteller I start with intention. This is where creation begins to express in form. It is the connecting point between the world of form and the world beyond form. It is the connecting point between time and the timeless. It is where the invisible begins to manifest. It is the invitation to the formless, timeless, infinite possibility to come into being. It is the invitation to the One to become what the mystic Loa Tzu calls, ?the ten thousand things.?

At least for me this word intention invites inner tending and inner tenderness. It is not the get up and go of an often disturbed over accentuated masculine approach to living life. It is more the humble grounded approach of the mature feminine. It is out of this groundedness that healing begins and wholeness can be known and felt. Both the masculine and feminine are needed for wholeness but it is the masculine that serves the feminine.

Each of us stands on the shoulders of everyone who has ever lived in form. This is particularly true of all those family members who have lived in form before we arrived within this time space body. The freedoms we have now are often taken for granted. They have often been won at the expense of deep personal sacrifice. This should not be forgotten. All families have wounds. It is within this wondedness that you have the stuff of wonder. As the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung pointed out, ?The gold is in the shadow.?

The shadow of our family history manifests in disease and as Louise Hay says, and as most wisdom teachers say, disease arises out of the unwillingness to forgive. The disease of my family manifesting as glaucoma arises from the pressure of long standing hurts. Yet it is not the long-standing hurts in themselves that is the problem or is the real problem the unease deepening into disease. It is the pressure from the resistance to letting them go that causes the suffering.

There are so many wondrous stories in books and movies that are available around this issue that is called forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn?t redeem the other person. It redeems you. It sets you free. It takes you out of the prison of separateness that you have allowed yourself to become deeply attached to. There is no judgement here. You are not being blamed but you are being invited. You do not do forgiveness. It is more that you become willing to see the world in a new way and allow that seeing to envisage your life. It is the willingness for something new to be that allows forgiveness to heal you.

The Key to Living Your Life's Desire

In Desiderata the inspiration poem by Max Ehrmann there is a word that holds the key to the whole of the poem. If you were to live this one word then you would be able to attain to the highest invitations in life.

It is the one word that the true invitation to Yoga tries to teach and invite you to know. It is the most practical of words but it is a much-misunderstood word. In the West we spend much of our time focused on this word but the way in which we focus on it keeps us from finding the key to a life of purpose, passion and prosperity.

For this Irish mystic storyteller this word is a riddle for most of us. It contains a practice that most everyone in the world worships and which keeps them enslaved. It is according to one modern wisdom teacher the cause of much of the world?s present problems.

If you live what this word invited then you would have stepped into a threshold place. If you lived the total invitation held within this word you would have the potential for what is called self-realisation and this is the experience of true happiness.

Max Ehrmann was a poet. Poets can take words and place them in a context where you are invited into the Deep Hearts Core. The beautiful invitation from Desiderata can be a poem that you simply read or a poem that you can use as a catalyst to becoming the beautiful radiance you are intended to become and to be revealed.

Poetry is not simply some sweet verse or some foreign language that only intellectuals can understand. If you have a hart and you are prepared to allow it to expand into the universal depth of its potential then poetry will, as it is intended bring you alive to your love nature.

So what is that word that if you live you will invoke the power of Desiderata - the list of desires that are at your deep hearts core and not simply something you are invited to acquire in a culture obsessed with the trinkets of never enough.

Lets make this more interesting. You tell me what that one word is from Desiderata and I will give you a full eCourse called Ready to Radiate for FREE. This course invites you to learn to live the invitation that you are here to be in all your glory. Simply email me what you think that one word solution is to

radiate@anamcaraexperience.org

If you went to a real wisdom school this is the word that would be written on the blackboard on the very first day. You would be called back to this word time and time again until you came to the revelation the poem invites. What is this word and why is it a foundational key to the true purpose of your life. More to come.

Desiderata and the Law of Attraction

Jack Cranfield writing in "The Key to the Law of Attraction" writes,

"Take time each day to step away from the clutter and the noise. A daily commitment to spend time in the still, quiet place is a commitment to clarify an inner peace. We need this time and space in our lives in order to remember who we really are, and what's important, and where our personal truth lies. It is time to calm the spirit and soothe the soul. It restores balance in our lives and it reconnects us to our source."

In Desiderata Max Ehrmann invites the same approach.

"Go placidly amidst the haste."

You might spend your time amidst the noise and haste and if you are like most modern Westerners your response is to armour what the mystic poet Mary Oliver calls "the soft animal of your body." You lock yourself out of what the poet David Whyte refers to as "a body in full presence." Another way of saying this is that you feel stressed out.

In order to distress many of us, and I have done this myself begin to self medicate. I self medicated for years on alcohol until it became clear that I was anything but placid and someone heading for a mental breakdown of some kind.

The ways that work for those of us willing to commit to a regular practice are meditation and/or prayer. Jack Cranfield recommends these in his book "The Key to the Law of Attraction."

Out of this practice you have more get up and go but it is not a kind of get up and go that is driven by a go getting personality setting out to prove that they are a winner. It is a get up and go that is alive, focused and in the word used in Desiderata, placid.

Placid means stillness. It means unruffled. It does not mean passivity. You are not invited to go into the noise and haste with a mild mannered kind approach. You are invited to move from the centre. You are centred in your true sense of self while the whirlwind of noise and haste whirls around you.

When I worked in London I took advantage of sitting meditatively in the mediation room of the London Buddhist centre. Usually sometime around midday I would get a real sense of well-being and calmness that I didn?t ever get when I missed sitting. I can say that I went placidly amidst the noise and hats that were the underground tube stations on the way too and from work.

I managed during the day to do the work in a calm and efficient manner and I got to remember and feel what the poet W. B. Yeats calls the peace that comes dropping slow and the peace that is at the deep hearts core. This kind of peace is often listed amidst peoples personal list of desires - their personal Desiderata.

So if you would like to feel more of the peace that comes dropping slow then download my Deep Hearts Core podcast that invites you to feel the peace of the infinite peace and to allow you to feel the real Law of Attraction and the real attractiveness within you. Simple click on the words Deep Hearts core and you will arrive at the beginning of a journey of destiny and fulfil your personal Desiderata.

Spiritual Direction - Let the Force be With You

The writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell is famous for many things. One thing is that he coined the phrase "Follow your Bliss."

In order to follow your bliss there are a number of prerequisites you need to follow in order to allow you to do this. You have to make it your intention, you have to be attentive, you have to be committed and you have to take action.

The first step is to be clear about your intention - your inner tending to and your inner tenderness. To follow your bliss takes courage. Look around you. Do you see a world were people are following their bliss. They are mostly following the herd. To follow your bliss means you become an outsider and individual.

To follow your bliss is often anything but blissful. It is often very challenging. It means you will be called upon to make choices that in some ways make you feel very divided. This is why following your bliss is often called The Hero`s journey.

To follow your bliss requires that you trust your own unique guidance system and you build on trusting this guidance system. You have, like many people had this guidance system misused and you have been told that it is not to be trusted. This guidance system is your feelings. To put it simply. If you get a feeling of inspiration follow it. Take action.

When inspiration arises do not over analysis it. Do not spend your time working it out to the last detail. Trust it even if it doesn?t make any sense. Have faith in it even if it doesn?t work out the way you think it should. This is probably because you think it should work out in a particular way and not the way Love intended that it manifest in your life.

Do not judge the result. Be discriminating. The result is the result. The more important aspect of the process is that you practice faith in feeling inspired and feeling the inspiration. It will return and it will be more directed the next time. Faith builds on faith not simply results.

This is what it means when Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie is told by his wisdom teacher, "Let the force be with you." This isn't any mysterious force outside you. It is your connection to your felt sense of spirit - your spiritual direction - your inspired direction. Your intention, attention, commitment and practice is simply to trust this feeling force of inspiration and follow it.

You are living in a culture that demands instant results. It is a culture in many ways that offers you little of true worth other than some material trinkets. To follow your bliss you have to become an artist. You practice the art of following your bliss. This means that you commit to learning to feel from your Deep Hearts Core. For more on learning to follow your bliss download some inspirational direction from The Deep Hearts Core Podcast by clicking on any of the links in these last two sentences.

Celtic Spiritual Direction - The Radiance of Finding

The Ready to Radiate Course is finished. The most difficult and challenging aspect for this writer is the structuring of the course so that it flows. So that you know I haven?t forgotten you I am touching base with you in this article entitled "The Radiance of Finding."

This article is written to remind you of what you will find once you move through the various stages of soul growth. These stages are not necessarily linear. They are described in many different ways in many different times and in many different cultural contexts. These stages are Universal but they differ because we as individuals are unique. We are like the snowflake. Each snowflake has seven aspects that apply to all snowflakes but each snowflake is different.

In accepting the invitation to be an Anam Cara that is the invitation to soul friendship you undertake to become a bridge.

You bridge the connection between that which you are in time and form with that which you are beyond time and beyond form. In order to develop this bridge we have in the Ready to Radiate course been invited to delve into poetry at a mystical level. At the beginning of this Ready to Radiate experience we looked at the poem written by W. B Yeats entitled The Song of Wandering Aengus.

In this poem you may recall there is the experience of the call of the soul. This is represented in the following lines.

a glimmering girl with
apple blossom in her hair
who called me by my name
and ran and faded through the
brightening air.

When the call first comes it tends to be unsettling or glorious and is often a combination of both. One thing that happens is that you find you cannot hold unto the beauty that fades through the brightening air. This is why the Anam Cara Experience is written. It is in order that you learn how to engage with beauty so that beauty becomes you and that you become more and more available to that which is the beauty within you.

Beauty as all wisdom teachers affirm becomes YOU.

It is a perfume of who you are. It is part and not apart from the image of you as the image of the Beloved. You are simply ignorant of this grace. This is not intellectual ignorance but ignorance in the way that one sees the world as separate. Ignorance is at the heart of most suffering. You ignore the radiance of the creation that you are and you suffer. This beauty that is calling to flow through you fades through the brightening air of spiritual understanding because your agenda is other than Love.

Did W.B.Yeats, writing as Aengus, ever find the glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair?

This writer thinks he did. You to can learn to be with the representation of beauty that flows through your being. It doesn't have to be a symbol of a glimmering girl. It is more important that you connect to a symbol that resonates with you and that you learn to express as a radiance of who you are. This symbol will change and it will change you, as you are willing to allow it to enter deep into your heart.

Let W. B. Yeats speak about how one feels when you allow the beauty that soul friendship expresses through you.

Vacillation (IV)


My fiftieth year has come and gone.
I sat, a solitary man
In a crowded London shop
An open book and an empty cup
On marble table top.


While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed so great my happiness
That I was blessed and could bless.

Each and every line of this reflection is pregnant with meaning.

Here there is no wandering through hollow lands and hilly lands. Here there is no searching to find where beauty has gone as Aengus does. The body is a sudden blazed. This is the radiance of connection to the soul. It doesn't come about through thinking about. It doesn't come about through emotional attachment to the mask of personality. It comes when the body is allowed to be in flow.

Mary Oliver expresses this beautifully when she says

You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.


From Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver


W.B. Yeats writes

At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy.. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life.. everything fills me with affection..... It may be an hour before the mood passes, but lately I seem to understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate.

These moments of unforeseen connection are the radiance of soul friendship. They are the stuff of the Anam Cara experience. They come unannounced. They are grace moments of expanded awareness of who you are. They not only heal you in the sense that you feel blessed but you heal others simply by being available to such grace moments.

W.B Yeats writes

My fiftieth year has come and gone.

You don?t have to wait until you are fifty although this is an age when matters of spiritual direction tend to call more and more. The work of soul friendship is to learn to be available to these moments as they flow. This openness to being available is represented by the line

An open book and an empty cup.

This is an open mind and an open body available for those grace moment to flow. This is presence. This is the flow of Love through form. You are blessed. No more chasing rainbows. You and the one who calls you by your name are no longer separate. You have come full circle and returned home.

In those moment emptiness is power. The open book is the state of no mind available to the One Mind. The empty cup is the state described by the Master Jesus in the first beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are they who are poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Certainly these grace moments are not available if your heart is filled with hatred or any other emotional state linked to feelings of separateness. These emotional states are the lead that the Anam Cara learns to turn into gold. This is the real work of soul friendship. This is inner work. This is responsible work and is healing work. In the Islamic tradition it is called Jihad. It is the work of consciousness rising which paradoxically you do by simply getting grounded in trust and letting go.

You do not find these grace moments away from the body. This is why the poet says

My body of a sudden blazed out.

This is why Mary Oliver says

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves

This is trust in the body as a vehicle for the flow of the Divine. It is trust in the flow of feelings; trust in the flow of thought without attachment to thoughts as being who you are. This is trust and letting go and letting real happiness beyond conditionality arrive unforeseen.

Let me leave you with a poem that will remind you to allow the grace note that you are to play through you.

Birdsong brings relief
To my longing.


I am just as ecstatic as they are,
But with nothing to say!


Please, universal soul, practice
Some song, or something through me!


Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks.

Blessings until we resonate with each other again.

Spiritual Direction from a Beatle

"I look at you all see the love there
that's sleeping while my guitar gently weeps.
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps."
George Harrison

In Corrogue I am on song.

This morning the mist hangs low in the far of fields. The landscape seems schroded in mystery. It is always new. It is always fresh to the eye that is accepting of it as it is. I want to go capture this mystery. It is how I imagine the threshold of Tir Na Nog would appear. I want to go and cross this threshold into the land of the ever young. This is the land of the ever-present moment.

All this week I have been singing.

This week I have been dancing as well. This dancing is a great technique for allowing one to get out of one`'s head and into the body. This is recreation. At this "place of the briars" (Corrogue) there is no one to be disturbed. Even the sheep dance and the cows look up from their feeding. I turn up the volume on the tape deck and play Annie Lennox singing "Why." This is a great song with a great question. It is a question about the failure of love.

This week I have had to walk into Dowra village one and one quarter miles from this cottage. When I am walking I have been accompanied by George Harrison's beautiful song "While my guitar gently weeps." I love this song. It is, for me, a song of deep compassion. It is the song of a seer. It is a song written and sung by one of great sensitivity. This is a real soul song. It is not a sentimental love song. It cuts to the heart of love and goes to what W B Yeats referred to as "The Deep Hearts Core."

In this song George Harrison tells us "I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping." This is beautiful. To be able to see and know that in each and everyone of us "love sleeps." This is a great knowing. For some this love is sleeping deeply. It sleeps because to often it has been wounded. It has not been welcomed.

To often love and the expression of love has become associated with pain. Better then to sleep without the need for this experience we call "love." Better not to venture into this place where the heart is vulnerable. So we choose not to risk all for love. We live outside our essence. Maybe we can settle for a little satisfaction. Let us not, however, venture into the vulnerability of grace and joy.

George Harrison sees "the love there that's sleeping." A soul friend sees the "love there that`'s sleeping." A soul friend laments this sleep. While love lies sleeping "a guitar gently weeps." This is the gentleness of compassion. The word "lament" comes from the words meaning, "to care."

This wonderful and wonder filled man plays a lament for the distance we are separate from love. What else to do? One has to lament. One has to enter a heart of vulnerability that says, "I care." More than this one has to enter the "will to care." One has to have courage to be this vulnerable.

When you are this vulnerable you discover you are the love that is always awake. It was only waiting for you to look through the eyes of the heart. You awake from the sleep of the ego. Until this time you are living in the dead of the past. You are never graced the entry into the only time you are alive. This is the here and now. This is the place of presence.

George Harrison gives you a great help to come awake to the love that sleeps within.

He sings, "I look at the floor and see it needs sweeping, still my guitar gently weeps." This is a great line. This is a Zen poem. It comes from a heart still weeping through his guitar. George Harrison and his guitar are not separate. They are one body. They have come to be at-one-ment. This guitar is a part of who he is. The voice of the Divine moves through him and his body. Then as he says "My guitar gently weeps." This is a holy instrument. This is a holy weeping. It is a lamenting for the unity of oneness with "all that is."

We are so often missing from life. We are too busy doing "our life."

We do not see what is needed in any moment. We do now know how to look. We look at the floor and we might judge. We would judge that the floor is dirty. We might think how little time we have to sweep the floor. We might think how our partner and our children are slobs. We might think how the colour of the floor has faded and maybe it is time to think about new kitchen tiles.

As for myself, when sweeping the floor, I might lament, "All those bloody dog hairs."

Then those, whose love never lies sleeping, go quiet. Our two dogs go and slink into a safe place. This is a place where the mad sweeping man might not find them. Sometimes the little dog will simply stand there and look. She becomes my little Zen master. I am her student. She reminds me that I am shouting. She reminds me that I should practice what I sometimes preach. She tells me, "Tony, the floor. That is all. Love in action. Just chill."

Sweeping the floor with judgement is our norm. This is our mind. This is my mind. This is who we think we are. We get so little experience of the real love that lies beyond sleeping. We go to various religious authorities. More than anywhere else the sleep there is often so deep they begin to have dreams that seem real. There you are encouraged to enter the sleep of belief. There you are told you are not even worthy to be standing on the floor.

Learn to look. Learn to just see.

The floor needs sweeping. That is all. This is love in action. Out of an awakened heart action moves. It is transformative. It is accepting. Energy flows feely. There is no attachment to results. Just sweep the floor. Just allow compassion to arise. We have lost faith in our passion and our experience of the flow of compassion. Let your heart lament the absence of presence.

Share your love and while you are at it drop the idea that it is "your love." Wake up for a moment and feel the love sleeping in your soul. You are this. You are the love that is sleeping. It is the flow of life moving through you. Love is not separate from you and will never be separate from you.

What needs sweeping is the dust of the mind.

It needs sweeping of all its attachments to all that it clings to. It clings to the past and is forever thinking about the future. All this "thinking about" crushes the heart. The heart is not felt. It is not trusted simply to be. You lose heart. You lose the ability to sweep the floor. You lose the ability to lament the loss of your birthright. You do not weep for the loss of soul. You do not weep for the loss of joy and the non-entry of grace. You forget how to lament.

When you hear a song running through your head stop and listen.

It is often speaking to what is termed "your condition." Allow this song space. Allow it some unconditional love. Then you might wake up to the love "there that's sleeping." You might wake up to see the floor just as it is.

This will be enough.

Finding Real Confidence - Locating the Pool of Wisdom

Tom Cowan writing in ?Yearning for the Wind? writes

?When the beautiful people known as the Tuatha de Danaan learned that another race of humans was about to invade Ireland their seers decided to hide the pool of wisdom. They removed it from ordinary reality so that morals could not find the water and misuse its power.?

This story is not just part of an old Irish story. It is your story and my story. This pool of wisdom is available to each and everyone of us. It is, however, extremely powerful. Most everyone who comes to drink of this pool of grace is transformed by it. It is hidden but there is the promise that those who seek shall find.

Only as one off the world?s greatest drinkers of this pool of wisdom says, ?First you will be troubled, then you will be amazed.? You will be troubled because you will call this wisdom your own and you will, as most everyone does, use it to serve your self-interest. This is what this Irish mystic storyteller has done and in some little way is learning to undo.

When you drink of this wellspring of infinite knowing you will be given what you ask for. You will misuse it. It is a wishing well that you are intended to use for wishing well and not simply for getting everything that you wish for. In such focus of self-interest you will be setting yourself up for trouble. This isn?t a punishment but the universe does not give such power to those who would rush in where angels fear to tread.

You will through the self-serving of the ego lose contact with this wisdom pool that is at your deep harts core. This is the troubling stage. It can last a long time. The wisdom is really cultivated by the work of integrating the understanding that arose from within the depth of your deep hearts core. This is a humbling experience. You come back down to earth with a bump.

The wisdom pool is not a pool that is a bank of knowledge that you acquire. The wisdom poll isn?t like a skills bank. It is a pool of paradox, of riddle or parable and of story. It is a pool that dispels ignorance. It takes you out of the spell you are under when you identify experience with the separate sense of self you call me, myself, I.

The wisdom pool is not a pool of know how. It doesn?t tell you what you should do in this or that circumstance. It is a way of knowing that is free of concepts of time and end results. It isn?t within the realm of thinking about. Thought is not wisdom. Wisdom arises downstream of thought from the silence and majesty of no mind. No mind does not mean absence of a sense of being but the awareness of the vastness of being. Thought is conceptual. Wisdom is boundless.

Spiritual Direction from a Beatle

"I look at you all see the love there
that's sleeping while my guitar gently weeps.
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps."


George Harrison

In Corrogue I am on song.

This morning the mist hangs low in the far of fields. The landscape seems schroded in mystery. It is always new. It is always fresh to the eye that is accepting of it as it is. I want to go capture this mystery. It is how I imagine the threshold of Tir Na Nog would appear. I want to go and cross this threshold into the land of the ever young. This is the land of the ever-present moment.

All this week I have been singing.

This week I have been dancing as well. This dancing is a great technique for allowing one to get out of one’s head and into the body. This is recreation. At this “place of the briars” there is no one to be disturbed. Even the sheep dance and the cows look up from their feeding. I turn up the volume on the tape deck and play Annie Lennox singing “Why.” This is a great song with a great question. It is a question about the failure of love.

This week I have had to walk into Dowra village one and one quarter miles from this cottage. When I am walking I have been accompanied by George Harrison’s beautiful song “While my guitar gently weeps.” I love this song. It is, for me, a song of deep compassion. It is the song of a seer. It is a song written and sung by one of great sensitivity. This is a real soul song. It is not a sentimental love song. It cuts to the heart of love.

In this song George Harrison tells us “I look at you all see the love there that’s sleeping.” This is beautiful. To be able to see and know that in each and everyone of us “love sleeps.” This is a great knowing. For some this love is sleeping deeply. It sleeps because to often it has been wounded. It has not been welcomed.

To often love and the expression of love has become associated with pain. Better then to sleep without the need for this experience we call "love." Better not to venture into this place where the heart is vulnerable. So we choose not to risk all for love. We live outside our essence. Maybe we can settle for a little satisfaction. Let us not, however, venture into the vulnerability of grace and joy.

George Harrison sees “the love there that’s sleeping.” A soul friend sees the “love there that’s sleeping.” A soul friend laments this sleep. While love lies sleeping “a guitar gently weeps.” This is the gentleness of compassion. The word "lament” comes from the words meaning, “to care.”

This wonderful and wonder filled man plays a lament for the distance we are separate from love. What else to do? One has to lament. One has to enter a heart of vulnerability that says, “I care.” More than this one has to enter the “will to care.” One has to have courage to be this vulnerable.

When you are this vulnerable you discover you are the love that is always awake. It was only waiting for you to look through the eyes of the heart. You awake from the sleep of the ego. Until this time you are living in the dead of the past. You are never graced the entry into the only time you are alive. This is the here and now. This is the place of presence.

George Harrison gives you a great help to come awake to the love that sleeps within.

He sings, “I look at the floor and see it needs sweeping, still my guitar gently weeps.” This is a great line. This is a Zen poem. It comes from a heart still weeping through his guitar. George Harrison and his guitar are not separate. They are one body. They have come to be at-one-ment. This guitar is a part of who he is. The voice of the Divine moves through him and his body. Then as he says “My guitar gently weeps.” This is a holy instrument. This is a holy weeping. It is a lamenting for the unity of oneness with “all that is.”

We are so often missing from life. We are too busy doing “our life.”

We do not see what is needed in any moment. We do now know how to look. We look at the floor and we might judge. We would judge that the floor is dirty. We might think how little time we have to sweep the floor. We might think how our partner and our children are slobs. We might think how the colour of the floor has faded and maybe it is time to think about new kitchen tiles.

As for myself, when sweeping the floor, I might lament, “All those bloody dog hairs.”

Then those, whose love never lies sleeping, go quiet. Our two dogs go and slink into a safe place. This is a place where the mad sweeping man might not find them. Sometimes the little dog will simply stand there and look. She becomes my little Zen master. I am her student. She reminds me that I am shouting. She reminds me that I should practice what I sometimes preach. She tells me, “Tony, the floor. That is all. Love in action. Just chill.”

Sweeping the floor with judgement is our norm. This is our mind. This is my mind. This is who we think we are. We get so little experience of the real love that lies beyond sleeping. We go to various religious authorities. More than anywhere else the sleep there is often so deep they begin to have dreams that seem real. There you are encouraged to enter the sleep of belief. There you are told you are not even worthy to be standing on the floor.

Learn to look. Learn to just see.

The floor needs sweeping. That is all. This is love in action. Out of an awakened heart action moves. It is transformative. It is accepting. Energy flows feely. There is no attachment to results. Just sweep the floor. Just allow compassion to arise. We have lost faith in our passion and our experience of the flow of compassion. Let your heart lament the absence of presence.

Share your love and while you are at it drop the idea that it is “your love.” Wake up for a moment and feel the love sleeping in your soul. You are this. You are the love that is sleeping. It is the flow of life moving through you. Love is not separate from you and will never be separate from you.

What needs sweeping is the dust of the mind.

It needs sweeping of all its attachments to all that it clings to. It clings to the past and is forever thinking about the future. All this “thinking about” crushes the heart. The heart is not felt. It is not trusted simply to be. You lose heart. You lose the ability to sweep the floor. You lose the ability to lament the loss of your birthright. You do not weep for the loss of soul. You do not weep for the loss of joy and the non-entry of grace. You forget how to lament.

When you hear a song running through your head stop and listen.

It is often speaking to what is termed “your condition. Allow this song space. Allow it some unconditional love. Then you might wake up to the love “there that’s sleeping.” You might wake up to see the floor just as it is.

This will be enough

The Magic Swirling Ship of Irish Mythology

Take me for a trip upon
Your magic swirling ship

Bob Dylan ? Mr. Tambourine Man

Most of us are on a trip. The question is, ?Is this trip taking me anywhere?? There is a paradox to the answer. If you think it is then you are not on a trip that is magical and will make your head swirl.

We need to have our heads swirl. Heads can be so full of knowledge that there is no room for the new. In our heads that have bee taken over from the ?swirling ship? of the heart resides the inner critic, the doubter and various related members of the ?playing small? family devoid of magic or mystery.

Irish mythology, which is a language of magic and mystery, can become a magic swirling ship. This is not just a trip into some historical time and place but the invitation to real magic. This is the invitation to the Timeless ? the NOW.

The Mr. Tambourine Man can play a song for you but you will be in a whirl. This is because all Tambourine Men (which also includes women) will play you YOUR song. You will tell them that this song is just too beautiful for words. They will then ask you, ?Why aren?t you playing this song.?

The Tambourine Man will then disappear and this song will haunt you until you meet again. Only this time you will be attuned to your unique time. The one that you came here to sing. The one that will take you as a magic swirling ship going in the true direction.

Return to Tir na nog ? Living the Time of Your Life

Tir na nog translates from the Irish as "The Land of the Forever Young." To modern intellects this story is a fairy story, meaning it is a fantasy. The intellect does not believe in a place where one lives forever and does not age.

The intellect is a wonderful tool but it keeps you bound to the prison of time and this is not the place where you can really enjoy the time of your life. To really enjoy your life you know who you are beyond time and form and space. Without this knowing (which is not an intellectual knowledge) you are living in a prison called time.

The Land of the Forever Young is not some mythical place but a state of being. It is the state of felt oneness with the source of Creation. Creation is created from that which itself was never born and never dies. In that sense it is outside what we call time. Forever does not mean an inexhaustible length of time. It is means no time at all.

An Anam cara invites you into the direct experience of living within time as a flow of the timeless. This is the direct experience of knowing yourself as the flow in form of that which is formless. This experience allows you to know the birthless, deathless state within. It allows you to know you truly are forever young.

The Fire that Takes no Wood

I went out to the hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head

W.B. Yeats ? The Song of Wandering Aengus

These lines open Yeats? great poem of the hero?s journey. This going to the hazel wood is undertaken by the outsider. This is the outsider who longs for the source of magic and miracle within.

The hazel wood is a place of sanctuary. It is a place of initiation. You are invited to be an initiate of the threshold places of the heart. This often takes you into a dark wood.

The fire in the head is a creative longing. It is the longing to be. To be is to be creative. You cannot not be creative, but you are given the choice in how you will express this creative fire that burns within you.

Many of us have lost the ability to feel the fire that burns within us to express love in action. We may lose it through grief or disappointment or listening to our internal critic rather than the voice of purpose and wisdom within.

Our fire has become the fire of ?doing? our life, where we get burnt out. It is a limited fire that consumes itself. We do not tend at the fire that needs no wood. We have forgotten what it is to sit and feel or creative, to be enveloped in its invisible embrace that warms the heart.

Through spiritual direction and soul friendship you can learn to tend the fire that needs no wood. The fire in your head is the natural call to creative expression as love in action. It never goes out. Except that most of us forget that this every creative potential is available to us if we enter the Deep Hearts Core.

This Irish Mystic Storyteller has a longing. It is the longing to share the invitation to the beauty at the deep hearts core. This is why I have recorded a weekly podcast that is given that name. The Deep Hearts core is the last line from W. B. Yeats? poem entitled The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

In the Deep Hearts Core Podcast this Irish Mystic Storyteller unfolds the invitation, not only from the poetry of W. B. Yeats, but from Irish mythology, Irish folk song and modern day song lyrics. This is an invitation for you to learn to allow your personal song of beauty to be sounded within the world and delight not only you but also others who see you living it.

So if you want a weekly input of inspired invitation to the beauty of who you are simply go to the following link and download the podcasts that interest you or sign up for a regular free subscription.

http://www.anamcaraexperience.org/podcast.html

A Story of Global Land Grabbing

John Vidal the Environment Editor of the Guardian writes

?The acquisition of farmland from the worlds poor by rich countries and international corporations is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe?s farmland targeted in the last six months, reports from UN officials and agriculture experts say.?

In the Guardian article entitled ?Fears for the world?s poor countries as the rich grab land to grow food? we are told

?Outsourcing food production will ensure food security for investing countries but would leave behind a trail of hunger, starvation and food scarcities for local populations. The environmental tab of highly intensive farming ? devastated soils, dry aquifer, and ruined ecology from chemical infestation ? will be left for the host country to pick up.?

Here we see more of the same by the forces of global capitalism hell bent on ensuring that they maintain their highest levels of return on capital employed. They have used up most all the capital resources that exist in their own countries having devastated the soil and water and now they are moving to countries where they can charge for their chemical quick fix that creates deserts.

As an accountant one of the first principles of sound business management one learns is that you do not erode your capital base. It is out of this base that you earn revenue to sustain your business for the long term future. If you find that you are using capital this is indicative of mismanagement. Not so it appears if the capital base is the soil on which we are all dependant to sustain life.

Return on capital employed is the driving force of corporate life. The higher the better. Chief Executive Officers of large corporations will no longer be Chief Executive Officers if return on capital employed is not increasing and damn the consequences. This increased return is reflected in rising share prices that are the be all and end all of the God called market forces.

Who pays the consequences? In the short term the poor and in the long term every one of us. Why does this happen. In simplistic terms it is because we in the Western world are not prepared to pay the cost of producing food in a way that is sustainable. We have become so used to cheap price food that we no longer accept prices that would reflect the full cost of production.

The result is that food is produced as cheaply as possible and as intensively as possible. When the resources of the land have been burned away through intensive chemical use the corporations move on to buy up other land resources by which they can maintain their one measure of success ? return on capital employed. No one stops to ask what happens when the capital base is fully eroded.

As a storyteller and writer on Irish mythology this fixation on ever increased return on capital employed would be recognised as a poisonous story. In a fairy story this market force would be represented by a poison apple. We are now a global village and this poison is set to come back to us in the West. We have allowed undemocratic forces to use resources that belong to us all in a self interested way.

Due to self interest we have refused to be stewards of the land in the interest of future generations. Sustainable food costs. It costs energy in the form of money. If that energy is not expended in the form of money it costs in other ways. The present system of ever cheaper food production costs lives. The price paid is that of hunger and starvation but not for you or me ? or at least not yet. It costs the lives of the most vulnerable in our global village.

Still the good news is that the FTSE index will in the short term have risen in the knowledge that the God of the market place will be for a little while appeased. At least until the land runs out.

Tony Cuckson


Quotes taken from the Guardian Friday 3 July 2009

Living the One Glorious Life

How does one as an Irish Mystic Storyteller begin to craft a story. One way is to pay attention to that which excites you and to be faithful to that feeling wherever it invites you to go. It also requires commitment and the ability to trust the process. It means learning to be comfortable with "not knowing."

Sometimes a story will simply happen and you have it down on the page very quickly. At other times the story is a kind of birthing. It will simply happen if you pay attention to simply getting out of the way and not being over anxious. In Zen such and attitude is summed up in the beautiful wisdom saying "Don`t push the river."

Pay attention when ideas keep coming back that you have resisted. Sometimes you will spend time with a story, even work very hard at a story, and it comes to nothing. Actually, what happens is that the story is flowering in a different way and will bloom through another story if you trust the intention.

When you feel excited, more than your head is involved. Excitement is the equivelant of the yellow brick road that takes you to the wonderland of Oz. Follow the yellow brick road. This is a metaphor for the wisdom road within you. It is the invitation to travel the beauty of the real story you are here to share.

Your real story is far more magnificent and more glorious than you might ever imagine. Trust this beauty to express as excitement within the body and live the one glorious life you have come here to be. You are the real wonder tale waiting to be told.