original posted October 20, 2014

Pondering/Question: Listening to the audiobook by Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment. I’m only a few chapters in, thinking about “awakening” and the process once activated that propels unfoldment on its own.

One story of Inquiry/Observation

Awakening has never been a goal of mine. I know this even as I have envied the nobility of this quest I’ve seen in others.

Fifteen years ago Dudley and I were eating in a vegetarian cafe on the outskirts of Sedona. On the table were cards with different Sufi stories, maybe other wisdom traditions too, I no longer remember, and we each picked one from the pile to read. Picking intentionally, like one would a tarot card. The teaching story on mine was of a seeker who arched the door of Heaven, of Enlightenment. Instead of crossing over in joy, the seeker said, “oh no, I’m not done yet, let me go on exploring.” The seeker turned away, travelled back down the staircase and went in investigation of the next. I laughed when I got that card because it was truth for me. Not the door of enlightenment part, but the exploring the next thing. I knew I didn’t seek what my dearest friends in the meditation group dedicated themselves to.

This trip to Sedona is the same one where the reader of our infrared chakra portraits told me that if I meditated more I could get mine to be all blue like Dudley’s instead of the one I had, reds and yellows and oranges swirled around the blue. She literally frowned when she said mine was so much like that of the healers in Sedona.

I may not label myself a healer but I think I understand something of that path, of the desire to enter with the person into the exact spot where the freest essence of a person meets what’s frozen, resisted, secreted.

This morning I am stopped on my drive to town. Despite the importance I place on getting to my destination on time I have stopped to replace one CD on a book about Awakening with the second in the series. Mid-journey I am paused on the gravel turnout just before the underpass. I can’t see the cars that travel above, only hear their passing in the crescendo and fall of engine and wind passing in opposite directions. The underpass demarcates Missoula’s Butler Creek drainage, the way into the mountains and expanse of three remaining ranches, with passage into the density of city. To my right diffuse morning light begins to transform the merged greys and browns of grasses and weeds and fencepost into their separate shapes. Their muted colors seem warm, comforting, despite signifying death, the end of one season of growth. One year already yielding to compost for the next. On my left the steeper hillside is still in shadow, slate colored, the distinctness of the grasses indiscernible. Dawn was more than an hour ago but the sun has not yet risen over the mountains to the east of town.

In my life change has been coming fast, moving like the twist of kaleidoscope colors. Some essence as essential as the sun pushes through me, a felt substance like gel, thickened, yet if I try to look at it directly it is invisible, like the air surrounding us all the time. I trust its arc is as ordained as the sun’s even though it has not yet illuminated for me the distinct shapes of my life, those meant to continue in new growth or pass away.

I’ve never before known such freedom, to be traveling toward and pausing in equal measure. To be at peace between shadow and barely revealed.