i thought

i didn’t want this

tenderness dripping

like slow warm rain

onto my dry and swollen tongue

bleeding from kissing

the selfish shards of shadows

lingering

like stray kittens

at my ankles

 

i have entered

you an apologetic thief

stealing moments

from an unknown eden

lips sticky

with its fruit

you have entered me

and I know

i am drunk

with this slow warm rain

dripping tenderly

down my cheeks

sometimes the stones say more

than i do in their

inexorable, grinding hymn of

self-annihilation

pressing with savage gentleness

against each other

loving each departing grain

as  a child

until eventually

they too are grains

whispering now

dancing together in

their liberation

it seems like such a strong blog title, i know.

perhaps because 'boycotting' is generally such a political and positional thing to do.

so boycotting might be a little too strong, because it is not about resistance.

for me, at least, this non-celebration of xmas is about allowing myself the space to simply enquire into what xmas is all about.

the answer is so blindingly obvious - and yet it is an answer that is so frequently ignored for a whole bunch of reasons - because of all the reframing we have done around what is, essentially, a christian festival.

i'm not christian, so why celebrate xmas?

god doesn't even exist in my experience of reality - so propping up a christian festival in any way is completely irrational

the answers i usually get, and the ones that up until now i have accepted and gone along with are usually something along the lines of xmas is a time for family.

what kind of a reason is that? and why? why xmas?

for me, the xmas period is an opportunity to rest, to recover from a year of hard work - because most of the world in which i do business is celebrating it, and so it's a logical time to close the office for  a few weeks.

if xmas needs to be the excuse to spend time with people you love, i would suggest there is something deeply out of balance in the way you live your life.

in australia this year we have heard that $35 billion is being spent on xmas - and it's being reported as if that's a good thing

the annual operational budget of UNICEF is only $2.7 billion.

surely there is something wrong with this picture? or maybe it's just me

instead of following a hard-wired compulsion to consume ever more - at a point in human history where the danger of our consumption patterns has been pointed out in significant and consistent detail - perhaps we might want to do the opposite and simply celebrate - quietly and without excess - the simple miracle that we live in a free and democratic world with a standard of living that is the envy of the overwhelming majority of the worlds population

and if we really feel we need to spend, why not give to those who are most in need, and let friends and family purchase for themselves if they genuinely believe it is of importance.

when you consider that on xmas day 72 000 children under the age of five will die of completely preventable diseases - as they do every single day - while 1% of the world's population control 80% of the planet's wealth [in predominantly christian countries] one could be forgiven for suggesting that perhaps, for christians in developed nations, they should be singing dirges instead of carols

or you could just call me a humbug and be done with it

Our Beautiful friend Jarrah singing with Gangaji.

She sang this song at our wedding

I realised last night, after an invitation to friendship, that I don’t really have any friends. Not because this life is lived alone, without intimate connection with others, but simply because a particular way of relating that once used to mean so much to me now has very little meaning at all.

Once, some time ago, I was challenged by a brother of mine that I ‘paid lip service to family’, and it was true. True because I was scared that if I really let someone else in, they would see in me what I was so desperate to keep from my self.

That I craved connection, and was terrified of what it would feel like to know that and to feel it ripped away by circumstance.

Since then I’ve come home to this moment, and have discovered in that a depth of emotion that is drowningly intense at times, an enormous crashing ocean of sensation that annihilates reason with tender mercilessness.

And the price of being here is that everything cannot be helped but be felt absolutely, completely, insanely beautifully, and every emotion is a glorious feast of indefinable, indescribable beauty.

And in this I’ve discovered the meaning of family.

My life is shared with others with whom there is a common felt understanding of that place where we are one – beyond form, beyond self-perceived, self-imposed and self-perpetuated boundaries, beyond all ideas of what is and directly to the heart of It.

Directly into life’s most magnificent heart.

So why express all of this? Because friendship is something I lost contact with some time ago. The promise of friendship, in my life, was something that I realised was a promise made to hold others at arms length.

Several years ago death whispered in my ear, she wrapped herself sinuously around me, seductively embraced me. She robbed my lungs of their breath and my heart of its rhythm, and I relaxed completely into her arms. I didn’t struggle, I didn’t fight. I didn’t resist.

I simply relaxed.

And it seemed in this that her fascination with me, her desire for me, her need for me fell in upon itself, collapsing like the banks of a river in flood, dissipating across the endless span of existence.

So she let me go, rejected me, decided perhaps that if I wasn’t going to fight her, or if I wasn’t going to fight for her, if I wasn’t interested in her one way or the other, she was no longer interested in me.

I had nothing to live for. I had nothing to die for either.

So I was cast aside by death and washed ashore on the banks of this life.

And laying there, in the dark and the cold, hearing nothing but the stuttering of my heart, the quiet breeze of my breath across my lips, I knew such perfect peace.

And I knew that every moment, every seemingly insignificant, irrelevant, inconsequential moment of our living is a Niagara of experience, a torrent of sensation, and that life simply seeks to know itself through me.

And all of my ‘friendships’ were washed away in this flood.

I don’t know what it means to be a friend.

I do know what it means to be family.

To be family means to be willing to be exposed, beautifully, brutally, without subtlety or art. It means being willing to be known, available to be known absolutely. It means an openness to being loved, to loving, to becoming love itself in the moments in which we are touched by the hand or the heart of another. It means to live without expectation that someone will give you what you tell yourself you need, to accept all that comes as a gift, to ask for nothing, and to celebrate without reserve in this moment of being with those who share their lives with you.

I know only one way to dance – with all of my self, with everything that I am. I am neither courageous nor fearful. I’m quite simply a man life has placed in your path for a reason I cannot fathom, and consider I don’t need to know.

I have no desire for life to be different to how it is. I have no expectation that life should look a certain way.

All I know is that you feel like family to me.

And I thank you for that.

Life is too short to be spent in safety and compromise.

I live recklessly abandoned to love – to the flow of it through me into the world, whether for my clients, my nephews, a lover.

I invite you to share this with me - somehow, anyhow, in no particular way or form - just however it arises for you to share it, if it does in any way at all.

Regardless, I know your face is turned towards the sun, and my world is that much brighter for the brief reflection of it I’ve seen in your eyes.

Thank you for the gift that you are to this life.

The written word is such a rarity these days. We all send each other text messages and emails – little blip-verts, fifteen second phone-calls, forwarded messages – someone else’s words substituting for our own. Even when we’re together, it seems, that we rarely touch on what is true to us – to the individuals we imagine ourselves to be, and to the larger consciousness, the we, the us, the togetherness that arises when two or more share space, share a meal, a conversation, a bed.

We ask lots of questions of each other, and imagine that this, somehow, is communication. That in this question asking, in this subtle, and at times not-so--subtle steering of a conversation in a particular direction, we create a safe space into which we can express an idea, having prepared the ground through minutes or hours or days of pre-conversation before ever getting to the point.

Some would call this the art-of-conversation.
Some would call this manipulation.
Some would call this marketing.

Perhaps, when it comes to expressing a new idea, a new concept, or service or product, this process may be useful.

Perhaps.

But what about when we are talking about how we feel? What about when we find ourselves wanting to tell someone that we love them? That we find ourselves feeling something for them that is unexpected, unasked for, unknown and unknowable? Do we prepare the ground, wait for the right moment, ask some questions to gauge where they are in relation to this relating, and then decide what we are going to say [if anything] and how we are going to say it?

I imagine that all of this rapid communication, this unwillingness to actually sit with each other and say it like it is, is guided by some misbegotten idea of freedom. That freedom is found in the non-attachment, the non-heart, the non-risking and hence the non-breaking of things. I imagine this because I am watching, in this moment right now, this breaking of my own heart.

And I know that this is not freedom – that this keeping quiet, this wanting to be having a different experience is a shackle that binds me to my self, to this limited idea of lovingness, to this apparently safe place of making-love without loving, of observing without seeing, of hearing without listening – this place that I imagined I could live, that seemed to be the right and the safe and the enlightened place to be.

And I laugh at myself for my hubris, for imagining I could ever know the mind of god through my own limited mind, that I could ever experience love by attempting to control the experience, that I could ever be touched by another human being in that most intimate of ways without feeling a breaking of my heart, a piercing of my self, an opening to the wonder of drowning in the ocean of life.

I share this with you because I love you. I share this with you in this way, perhaps, because I am a coward and I would rather not hear you say “we need to talk about this [which inevitably we will]”. I share this with you because it is true [how could it not be if love is all that exists?], and no amount of efforting on my part is going to make it any different. I share this with you as an invitation – an invitation not to experience love in all of the limited, controlling, pre-defined ways we have experienced before, but to open ourselves to what is bigger than us in every moment we are together – in the way we do with our friends, our families, a puppy or the ocean.

Without definition, without expectation, without limitation – the only commitment being to the deepening of our own experience of loving.

And this invitation, like all invitations, is not one that needs to be accepted. There is no RSVP. There is no date on which this offer closes – because at the end of the day I am making this invitation to my self in as much as to you.

And I have already accepted.

Let me know if you’d like to dance.

There is only one love.

We trick ourselves by telling ourselves there is more than this Love, but in Truth, there is only this.

We categorise it, classify it.

We analyse and dissect it.

Yet the categories and analyses, the dissertations and speeches we make about Love rarely seem to touch upon that which truly breaks our hearts.

How would it be if every day, Love shattered you?

How would it be if every day, Love mercilessly, but with the sublime gentleness of  a mother, broke your heart?

How would it be if every day you were rendered mute by the enormity of Love that surrounds and contains, nurtures and holds the space in which you find yourself in this moment right now?

How would that be?

It would be different, I imagine, to the way you are used to living.

It would be different, I imagine, to the way you are used to loving also.

It would be different to what we have come to expect of life, different to the expectations, that no matter how we might think we are bettering ourselves through, only serve to suck the very essence from this moment, dry up the spring and stop the tears in our eyes before they ever have the chance to spring forth and water the garden in which we are standing.

A mended heart is incapable of truly feeling; it needs to break over and again to let nourishment in.

Every time you fix yourself, you kill yourself.

God knows this, which is why she keeps breaking your heart.

You are so much more than this.

So much more than this life.

One day you will be gone, and what will this body, this mind, these thoughts and these achievements mean then?

Most of what you have accomplished will die when you die.

So why not die now?

Why not let yourself die in the arms of the Beloved?

We’ve all been here before, I know.

At least, if we haven’t, it’s unlikely we don’t know someone who has.

Misery.

But not the visceral, gut-wrenching, throat-crushing, i-don’t think-I-can-breathe type of misery.

Misery of the contained kind, the controlled kind, the i-don’t-think-i-can-let-it-all-in kind.

Misery of the just-another-beer-or-cigarette-and-I’ll-be-alright kind.

Yes, that kind of misery.

The misery of the every-day every-man, the misery of the broken-hearted, broken-willed, broke-down life.

This is the misery we really should dread, because it is the misery we use to convince ourselves that we are alive.

Except of course that we use it to keep ourselves from life.

It is here, on the edges of insanity, that Love comes and claims us for her own.

Five hundred years before me, Rumi beckoned his followers to “ask for madness in Love”.

It’s an odd exhortation – after all, surely what we all want in a seemingly increasingly turbulent world is a measure of certainty and stability?

But I have never been able to resist the siren song of Love, and have found myself again and again broken apart on the stony shore of her temple.

Some would say that I am merely a bad sailor – and there is no doubt a measure of truth in this. Others, of a more romantic persuasion would admire my resolute stand for passionate, life-altering love in a world of designer emotion.

Personally, I see a measure of truth in both.

The real question, however, is what comes before, during and after the experience of love?

Yes. Love itself.

Not the love of perception. Not the love of two bodies, two minds, two hearts – one for the other. Love itself as unspoken devotion to Love, Love as unyielding, uncompromising, unending. Love as it has always been, before there was anyone here to see it, and anyone here to forget it.

Love itself requires no witness, and demands that the witness must perish for Love to be known in completeness.

This is the wedding I’ve been planning.

This is the family I’ve been praying for.

This is the love of my life, she who will never leave me, but who I must bow before and dance as she warmly invites me to my own execution.

Let me whet the stone with my tears as you sharpen the blade that pierces me with never ending sweetness.

This is my laughter.

This is my song.

This is the fullness of my heart, the blood that enlivens me, the tenderest kiss, the intoxicating knowing.

This is who I am.

Yes!

The love that we usually speak of, the I love you kind of love, is not usually love at all. It is usually just a form of control. If I love you is held to be true, then I don't love you can equally be held to be true.

Yet both of these statements are predicated on the existence of the I who is loving. As with most things spoken, the focus turns to the words themselves, instead of the speaker. I love you is usually false because it is assumed there is both an I to be loving and a you to be loved.

Yet where do you end and I begin?

I love you is not usually a clear expression of what words cannot contain. It is not usually saying I am the love of you.

The reason we usually say I love you is because of a desire to control the listener - to make them happy , to draw them to us, hold them to us, to get them to return to us.

It's not conscious - at least not most of the time.

It's just confused.

It's a socially acceptable form of projection.

It's an unconscious contract to manipulate each other until we are no longer getting what we want, at which time we are free to say I don't love you anymore or I don't love you like that anymore.

But does love stop just because I say so?

Love will not accept any of the limitations we seek to impose upon it, and will break us apart again and again, ploughing mercilessly through every barrier we erect against its passing.