I began by thinking to myself, “I will log in and write a few words about what is happening.” This is a reasonable stance for a first-year blogger. And I could do that… if I actually knew what was happening. But I don’t. For a while now I’ve been developing an interpretive disability. I see something. I hear something. But I can’t decide what it means. I can’t tell if it’s a win or a loss, a success or a failure, cause for rushing in or a good time to retreat. It’s not exactly shoe-gazing or becoming a bump on a log. I’m not sitting on the fence, uncertain of my position. It’s just that my Position is revealing itself to me and it’s not done yet.
At work I am a hive of productive activity. During my commute my blood flows in eager circles while immersed in the tonal forest of the new Pearl Jam album. My lower jaw is more relaxed than ever in between meals, but then I’m hot as an electric socket when the car won’t start and it’s time to go somewhere. (I can still dial it up at the drop of a pin, but sometimes my exuberance remains a tad misplaced.) Something is occurring in time with my name on it, but it doesn’t belong to me, and it sneaks up on me when I’m just being normal. Something outside of time is bleeding through the edges and into me.
I realize I don’t really know what is happening, and it is good. I can see there are others out there, too, developing this condition. When we make eye contact, we wink, recognizing neither one of us knows what the hell is going on, while seeing we share an understanding that it is, quite clearly, happening, and that it’s wonderful and a touch heady at the same time- like racing the wind towards the cliff at the end of the world in a borrowed speed boat. We’ve never piloted a speed boat before. Not those long skinny ones that burn rocket fuel and have a lot more torque than sense. Wind feels nice, though. We know something happens when we reach the cliff, but we won’t find out until we get there.
This is what we know, but cannot explain.
We are the Tribe of the Unknown Becoming. We are allowing ourselves to be remade on the inside. We didn’t have to become perfect for this Process to find us. We couldn’t have done that anyway. We’re simply beginning to recognize we’re down to the last option, the only one that could ever succeed anyway: grace. Our days are not spent prescribing solutions to the world’s problems. Our days are spent how they’re spent- yelling at traffic, washing dishes, writing legal briefs, assembling tractors, researching the nature of atoms- but we’re under no illusion that our use of time could be optimized in a way that would fix everything. We’re absolutely certain that the thing we can’t describe, the that we’ve given ourselves to, is comprehensive. But we couldn’t make that logically apparent to anyone who still thinks there’s a fix outside of grace that could work.
Don’t ask me to weigh in on health care legislation, for example, to call it good or bad, helpful or hurtful, timely or unfortunate. I said already, “For a while now I’ve been developing an interpretive disability.” Don’t ask me how anyone should be or live. Don’t ask me which philosophy is the right one.
I found a quote in A Course of Love that I liked. There are many like that, but I thought this one really got at the root of a question that has been going around: are we creative beings who shape our own reality, or are we in our various spiritual practices always surrendering and accepting the world in a way that brings peace, but renders us “powerless”? Jesus here is speaking about what he calls the “conditions of the time of acceptance”, meaning the conditions of life that we experience as we accept ourselves fully for who we are, warts and all, (as well as the Truth of who we are). He says, “Another replacement is that of control with grace. This occurs as you give up the control you have but thought you exerted over your life and its circumstances, and live in a state of grace, meeting grace with grace by accepting what is given for your regeneration.”
Until you’re in the speed boat screaming along the surface of the water at Mach 3 towards an embankment of emptiness, it is hard to understand how it could be possible that the things we desire most, above all else, are precisely the things grace would give us if we would but let it. There is no gap, no difference, no possibility that the greatest power in all the land could desire anything for us other than we desire.
Of course, we’re only now beginning to find out what that is…
Embracing Forever 
Well said. Thanks for the wink. I have hope..though it is a strange state to be in.
L
LikeLike
Thanks, Laurie. It is indeed a strange place- but hopefully a good strange. Like a joyous deja vu, both unexpected and familiar at the same time. Peaceful, but full of movement, like a stony brook. Michael
LikeLike
🙂
LikeLike
This sounds like a very exciting time of transformation that is happening to you! Really happy for you and looking forward to learning what happens next in your life!
LikeLike
Thanks, Teresa. You and me both! I am feeling less fear or resistance or whatever you might call it to the notion that the silence and the stillness all around us are alive. And supportive. And we’re all part of it. Whatever is happening that involves Love in any of us, is for all of us… Michael
LikeLike
Wooowww I loooved your post! I also feel like I don’t know what’s happening and don’t see things coming, but at the same time feel strangely peaceful. And I am a shaman tracker, I believe a good one hehe Yet things related to myself have been passing me by lately… xox
p.s. You may like to read my good WP galpal’s, Aleya’s, post http://alohaleya.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/self-love-is-in-the-gut/
LikeLike
Thank you! I enjoyed your note and Aleya’s post as well. It is so great to write about an experience and realize it is a shared one. Things passing me by feels like a good thing, especially when it comes while relaxing into a state of allowing. These ideas-notions-realities that arrive, I think they are gifts, discoveries of who we are… It’s a good channel to be watching! Michael
LikeLike
Amazing and thank you friend, there are many inspirational articles
LikeLike
Thank you, GP. I appreciate it very much. Looking forward to reading more of your own writing. Michael
LikeLike
I am with Shamanictracker, I loooooove this post too. So exactly, yes! Something is occurring in time with your name on it, which is also my name, which is also all of our names, our real and shared names. I don’t want to say much because this is all so it, without anything I can add. Every line pings internally, except the music, which you made me curious about… 🙂 I feel like I can sit back because Michael captured the shared experience!
LikeLike
Yes, indeed! It has our name on it… As for the music, that was a recent album of choice… Some days it’s a Steve Reich composition. Some days Dinosaur Jr. Some days Zoe Keating. Some days… There is more music in the world than I could ever listen to that I’m sure I would love and enjoy. We enrich one another beyond belief… Thank you for sharing and reflecting this nebulous experience of being and becoming. Michael
LikeLike
I hope this quote might encourage you as it does me (as I resonate with your post!): “We have to move out of ‘business as usual’ and remain on the threshold (limen, in Latin) where we are betwixt and between. There, the old world is left behind, but we’re not sure of the new one.” (Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr) For me, it feels like you’ve put into words that “betwixt and between” place. THank you for putting words to it!
LikeLike
Yes! That quote is great. I think there is something wonderful about allowing ourselves to remain in that place. Some days it feels like an act of will- more of an active mode than a passive one of allowing- as if I need to remind myself that even though it seems like life as I’ve always known it is what I’m experiencing, the spaciousness exists to experience it as an open-ended encounter with the unknown. The former is like the auto-pilot default… If we don’t perturb that inner system, it settles back down to deciding that what is happening is exactly what it thought was happening. Ha!
Thanks for your note and quote-
Michael
LikeLike
These are the clocks that I chose to place on my mantel. They don’t work. Well, they don’t work keeping time in the normal way anymore :). They are my mystical physical reminder of a doorway of choice is available to enter into the time of no time (some also say NOW time!) just one new (or one currently unknown) thought away.
I always find myself with an inner giggle when we wink at each other in passing.
-x.M
LikeLike
They look like good clocks. Your winking must be working wonders. They look to me like a mama bear and a baby bear. My guess is they probably feel quite relieved to be freed of their duties counting all those minutes and hours, and allowed to sit in stillness, serving as access portals rather than machines. Clocks can transform, too, eh! “Your not a clock, and I’m not a human. We’re square, right???”
Michael
LikeLike