Loving the Landscape of Joshua Trees

Creating a List of What You Love

Each day I am aware of the things I love, be they ideas and thoughts, places I have been, or objects. Either they come into my mind in some fleeting way or I see them before me. One day I decided to write them down. The list began this way:

• Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert
• Medieval documents and times
• Norman architecture
• Neolithic monuments
• Books and music of Hildegaard de Bingen
• Julian of Norwich
• Being in Presence
• Walking the wall surrounding York

Expanding the List of What You Love

Other thoughts crowded in and other objects were noticed, so I began to write the list of what I loved in a stream-of-consciousness mode, just whatever came to mind, and ended up with this:

Maeshow, writing stories, working with people involved in the evolution of human consciousness, Renaissance and baroque music, William Byrd’s motet, Harry’s care, practicing Celtic harp, following old sci-fi movies, writing blog posts, Skype talk with friends, coffee shop with friends, podcasts with friends, QiGong, following wildlife groups, bougainvillea, the color indigo, hearing chimes, UFOs, reading mystery authors and other books, reading the Seth books and Edgar Cayce, experiencing the natural world, Shawangunk mountains, and prayer and attending to spirit, golden retrievers, wolves, conserving the earth, Jane Goodall’s writings, medieval herbalists, scribes in abbeys, illuminated manuscripts, prehistoric monoliths of Northumberland and Wiltshire, ancient bells of England, Old English words, Northern Cardinals, silence of snow falling, sparkly things…

There are more, and yet time seems to stretch and accommodate everything. I keep expanding the list. And recently I began collecting images of the list, some of which I show below. This, too, I am continuing to do.

Your List Reveals Your Heart

What comes to mind most of all is that all these things bring a response in my heart — they are not transitory — they are aspects of this precious life given to me to know and encounter. It is their particular presence in my life from inner and outer journeys taken that makes their combination unique to me, a shaping force, if you will. Writing them down and gathering images of them brings a great peace of heart.

Neolithic Spirals Carved into Rock

Shawangunk Mountains in the Hudson River Valley

A Medieval Herbalist

Precious Gray Wolves

Large Neolithic Rock Spiral in Northumberland, England

Visions Being Received by Hildegaard of Bingen

Each of us has such a unique list, both in words and in images that circumscribe who we are, a list of what we love.

What might such a list of your own look like–become? Do feel free to share any part of it in a comment below. It is in the sharing much of it comes to life.

It is human nature to let ourselves become fixed in certain patterns that can hold us back by constricting the heart, limiting what we are able or willing to feel and know. It is by changing these patterns that you can allow your heart to express fully and to give light and love to yourself and then out into the world.

Our tendency is to seek out patterns of safety and comfort and security, but in truth these are transient and fleeting, often mere shadows of what we had imagined they could offer to us. Their magic does not last long, for our discontent surfaces eventually.

Why the discontent? Part of the reason is that we are not made to remain static or unchanging. We are wired to be curious, to move beyond what we are. We are created with an insatiable curiosity to find answers, to experience life, and to allow the vulnerability of love.

The Energy of the Heart

The heart seeks love. The heart IS love. This gives it immense power.

There is scientific evidence that an electromagnetic field of energy operates in your heart just below your conscious awareness:

“The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body. The electrical field as measured in an electrocardiogram (ECG) is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain waves recorded in an electroencephalogram (EEG). The magnetic component of the heart’s field, which is around 100 times stronger than that produced by the brain, is not impeded by tissues and can be measured several feet away from the body.” (HeartMath® Institute)

Imagine that kind of expansion, feel it extending out from your heart as you stand still in one place. That field  informs you about what is going on around you every moment — and you can decipher those messages if you don’t react to emotions you feel but instead “listen” to the awareness that lies beneath them. If you remember that those emotions are as transient by their nature as the “fixed” patterns you cling to. If you are open to allowing that awareness of the heart’s field to speak to you.

Heart Awareness

You experience this electromagnetic field of the heart every day, every moment. It apprises you of the presence of others. Through it you intersect at the energy level, the electromagnetic level, and sense your connection with other human beings — it informs you of the true nature of that connection.

The thought of changing our ways and beliefs — our fixed patterns — can frighten us, and some of us would do anything to prevent whatever we think that change means or could bring. We feel threatened by it. Yet if we yield to that fear we begin to close down the heart and attempt to shut down its expanded field, to retreat from  connection and communication with others who do not share our “safe” patterns.

Yet even that does not really work. Eventually, all things change. And that is the conundrum — as humans we seek security and predictability, but as humans, it is the last thing we are capable of sustaining.

We are always, in the present moment, in the midst of change that appears in the next moment, and the next, and the next. It is life. It is the heart of life. We are meant to live within that awareness.

Look out at the world around you, the world you apparently can detect through your five senses — the table, the street, the sound of a car passing by, a leaf falling from a tree, a voice calling out nearby, a blue vase on a windowsill, a letter or email you receive, a train’s whistle in the night — and a million more such things that come before us, that we think are real. But they are not real in the way we believe.

For a long time now quantum science has opened for us the scientific fact that we have no proof of this world’s existence without our consciousness of it. We actually have no proof, scientifically, of what exists beyond our physical eyes — they are but translators to the brain of data that apparently (and unproven) exists in time and space at a particular frequency. In physical terms, if we shift the frequency, what we “see” changes, which could account for access to alternate states. Then, physiologically, the brain reconstructs what we think we see based on only partial information. Imagine how absolutely individualized that process must be for every human being!

What we do see without question are representations of our inner consciousness, states of mind that we have created ourselves and expressed through our reactions to the world and everything in it. We may share these states with others, but they can change on the instant. People interpret what they see according to what they want to see, even if that wanting is subconscious and they are unaware of its inner origin and effect. Since 95% of our perception is subconscious, we can pretty well be assured we aren’t getting the whole picture about our own consciousness — unless we decide to become more aware of how our inner self sees.

The quickest way to become aware is noting what happens around you if you feel sad, angry or emotionally upset in any way, or by contrast, feel at peace, happy, and content. What is the state of the world you see then? Always, it reflects your state of consciousness, which changes constantly. But if certain emotions stay front and center, then your world collapses into the expression of those emotions. If you feel angry for an extended period of time, the outcome can be volatile in expression and engage you with inner suffering. If you feel gladness and joy for an extended period of time, your world expands and embraces all around you with compassion, tolerance, and love. You are the decider. Your world is the one you create.

Thus, if we create heart consciousness — if we cultivate compassion — we can begin to change the world — a world our headlines tell us has need of us in this way. We are so much more than we have conceived through our five senses until now. There is so much more within us to discover.

And each step towards this inner awareness and heart consciousness changes what we see, and therefore, what the world becomes.

We Are a Miracle

As the wonderful French philosopher and priest Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

You are included in that. We all are. No matter how we see ourselves in this moment, the truth is we are at our center made of star stuff, our origins existing in and beyond the starlight.

One way to see what a massive miracle you are is to realize that human beings have lived on the planet just a few seconds in geologic time, yet each day you are presented anew with this precious world to experience, discover, and know. You could say you are earthbound stars experiencing this curious physical existence, figuring out how to move forward, how to identify who you are and what your work is, and how you can do it.

How Do You Know You Are a Miracle?

The answers are all around you. However long you live your life, it is a life held in unconditional love, something our five senses and worried emotions often hide from us. This never changes. If you stop for a moment, just one moment, and feel the presence of such love, you are forever changed.

So why is this not our common state? Why instead is there angst, despair, deep worry, anger, fear?

Life is a process in which you are meant to do the work most central to your inner self, where true knowing exists. Another way of saying this is that we are meant to leave it to God, and to extend ourselves in service to the ideal of that spiritual connection. We always know when we have done that, for we feel happy and fulfilled, no matter what that work may be.

In the Psalms it is written:

Be Still and Know  I am God

Say that in that moment when you stop, if you decide to allow that moment to happen. Do this often during the day. Nothing will be the same.

In ancient times when the sun set on the Winter Solstice, creating the entrance into the longest night of the year, rituals and prayers were given in awe to honor the light and prepare for the darkness that followed. At a heart level the people had no certainty the sun would rise again, and when it did the next morning, it was a cause for immense celebration, for the sun was the source of life.

Now we know it will rise. We seldom take time to feel awe. The natural world continues without much of our attention. Yet it is the natural world that sustains us, not our technology, not our hectic pace, not our politics or money or wanting of this or that.

In our own corner of the Universe we are given a bounty beyond measure. In the sound of the wind, in the call of a bird, in the fleeting sight of an animal crossing a meadow, in a child’s laugh, we are in a sacred place whether we acknowledge it or not.

On this particular day, as the sun sets, take note of it, if you will. Stop whatever you are doing and thinking for just a moment, and give thanks to the sun, a prayer for its return, and a welcoming of the long night with the anticipation and hope for a new day.

In this way we align with the ancient ones who understood we are not separate from the natural world, but in our own corner of the Universe we are embedded in it, a part of the whole, an abiding and deep and vital part of All That Is.