no longer working to get free
(or fix or heal or please)
no longer needing to understand
how any of this is possible
not to mention
knowable
I rest
entirely wrapped
in wonderment
Photo by ml:
A recently completed small work, a candle, my mother’s ashes, a daffodil, an apple and a magic arrow
2021 covid lockdown, Aotearoa New Zealand
I don’t know what it is.
I can’t meet it face-to-face.
I can’t turn my back on it.
It’s impossible to flee from it.
If, by some wild grace
(I don’t know what that is, either)
it turns its all-knowing eye upon itself,
the default idea of duality
(by which I mean the unquestioned compulsion to label, define and separate)
vaporises.
Even the concept of ‘one’ is clearly one idea too many.
Knowing without a centre, without a knower,
knows.
It excludes nothing. It has no preferences.
Separation ceases.
The old urge to know what it is,
how it is, why it is,
has become irrelevant, obsolete, laughable.
I say: here it is. Show me how you can possibly ignore it.
– ml
2021
Painting by Michael Leunig, Desert Song Man
The knowing of Knowing
is the sweetest somatic intimacy, the ultimate G[od]-spot.
It’s no wonder poets pen passionate love-notes
to their beloved Beloved.
It’s more evident than any revelation,
more obvious than anything observed.
Yet this seamless saturation is neither an experience
nor anything that could be called an attainment.
It’s prior to consciousness,
to memory, to perception, to imagination.
(I say “prior to” but I don’t mean a-p-a-r-t from.
Perhaps precursory would be a better word.)
How mysterious that it’s completely overlooked, ignored,
while at the same time
hungered for/longed for/searched for/worked for/studied for/meditated for/practiced for/prayed for/paid for, in time, devotion and sacrifice . . .
What a joke!
No GPS can locate it.
Yet it’s inescapable.
I don’t need a guru, method, scripture, sledgehammer
to wake up to the fact that whatever I am
is unarguably and precisely whatever I perceive, experience, feel.
I only have to look from a silent mind.
To acknowledge this Knowing –
to abide as it, to act as it –
restores me to the all-inclusive immensity
I knew all along.
All along.
Since breath #1 was gasped on a summer’s morning in 1944
and these innocent eyes first opened
onto the mindscape
before
words like suffering and salvation were sown there
sprouting addictive fantasies
about enlightenment, transcendence, escape
before
I was thought-washed to believe that
the embodiment of this Knowing
would erase every discomfort and dysfunction from my experience
before
the dark net of distinctions descended
before
I learned to be clever.
– miriam louisa
Artwork by Jean-Michel Meurice
Urgell 1, 2004
Acrylic on fabric, 215 x 215cm
More info HERE
I love the way this work portrays the richness of our circular existence, the dance of the dreamer around the still, silent core. It’s a wonderful example of contemporary Tantric art.
It’s been a year of farewells: a brother, an artist comrade, and now another old buddy from my peer-group has gone.
Again I meet the temporality, the impermanence of this experience of being alive.
Again something rises to state the actuality of my experience – not to comfort or console, but to remind myself that everything appearing is a window onto the everlastingly unaffected.
So what?
So that whatever life dishes up has some small chance of being met with honesty and presence. So that I might be sane enough to remember that my wishes – no matter how profound – have nothing to do with what-is. So that I might see directly, act appropriately.
I’m ok with old age. The need to change anything falls away. Candles in the wind.
Yet (occasionally) (rarely these days) I’m moved to share a confession. You never can tell, it might be the last one. And there are things I want to say before I go.
Thank you for reading.
This confession was originally posted on my blog this unlit light in 2011. Recently I’ve been reminded about the little cache of my writing that quietly rests over on that blog and it’s been suggested that I share some snippets here for readers. I figured that when the time was ripe to do so, I’d get a prompt.
It came a few days ago, over lunch with a couple of dear friends. We were talking about the way humans seem compelled to “find their tribe.” To join forces with those of like mind, to feel a sense of belonging and validation. I had to admit that I’d never found a tribe or group that didn’t end up either disappointing me, or spitting me out for disappointing them. If I had a tribe it would be in the league of the Rank Outsiders, the Solo Fliers, the Holy Rejects.
The conversation got me reminiscing about my mid-life preoccupation with finding where I fit. It wasn’t so much about finding a tribe as finding my so-called niche. It went on for the first half of my life and only disappeared (taking the need for company with it) when the split between the niche-less one and her experience zipped itself up. It had a lot to do with acknowledging what she loved to do (play with colour, texture, visual language), because in that encounter she unfailingly disappeared into the unknowable: into her numinous niche.
I have no idea how it happened. Love has a mind of its own; it slowly seeped out of the studio and into the everyday encounter with all-that-shows up. The niche I had imagined to be my ‘place’ was none other than this numinous now.
About thirty years ago I confessed to a kindly iridologist that I felt I had failed to find my ‘niche’ in life. He peered into my bright blue eye-maps and remarked that it was strange, because everything he could read there indicated that I was a highly capable person who could find a niche in many avenues of expertise.
It worried me, that feeling of being niche-less. I was in awe of those who seemed, from a young age, to know exactly what they wished to do in the world and set about achieving it. And it wasn’t helped by those who knew the potential here and kept asking when I was going to fully explore (exploit?) it. I was in my mid 40s and still wondering what I would be when I grew up.
I had all the right tools: a reasonably sane brain, a good education, some skills as an educator as well as in the area of art and design, but my life-path seemed like a meandering groping from one neti-neti to the next.
I tried being a teacher, a broadcaster, a fashion designer, a wife, a lover, a wandering yogini, a ‘professional’ artist. All those niches ultimately failed to fit. The role that held the most promise was that of the artist, but the funny thing was that whenever the flow of genuine creating was going on in the studio, I wasn’t there. I mean, ‘artist-me’ was AWOL. In its place there was a spacious, ownerless activity unrelated to all my small ideas of what should be happening. And the moment the ‘artist-me’ tried to examine this mysterious activity it would vaporize. It was ungraspable and unknowable.
Later I would find a philosophy that made sense of this mystery – it is spoken about by sages and artists alike as the movement of pure nondual Awareness. But back then it was a total enigma to me; it put the fire under a lifetime’s exploration of creativity. And it eventually delivered me to the niche I had given up any hope of finding.
My niche turned out to be that ineffable intimate Awareness itself. And the amazing thing is that it always had been! It had been my preoccupation for decades, yet I had failed to recognize that it was a valid contender for the niche stakes. I had conceptualised the niche-notion, irrevocably keeping it at arm’s length and ensuring the survival of a niche-less seeker trapped in time. Truly, I can be quite slow …
When the penny dropped, a lifetime’s worth of seemingly incoherent bits of ridiculousness fell into place. I fell about laughing like a lunatic. The absurdity and awesomeness of it! The beauty and simplicity and grace of it!
Like … landing on a bed of rose petals … sinking into their silken perfume … resting, at last … knowing that this simple at-one-ment always runs below the surface of experience, ALL experience … knowing that you never have to leave … even if it were possible!
– miriam louisa
(With minor editing to accomodate a further seven years’ worth of lightbulb moments.)
Artwork: Lawrence Carroll Untitled, 2015
Artificial flowers, pigment, stain, housepaint, dust
7,5 x 218 x 185 cm
alone in my hut
[no one here to invent me]
eyeballing emptiness
Seventy three missions
around the sun and not
one thing of worldly value
to show for it.
No savvy safety-nets:
investment portfolios, insurance policies,
plans A, B and C. I walk the way
of not-knowing and wonderment.
Lofty notions of enlightenment, bliss,
exalted understanding have no buyer here;
I’ll take this uninvited, serene,
free and priceless fulfilment.
See, today I heard the air sing
as it danced through the rainbow wings
of a Lorikeet suspended
in space.
Today I watched cumulonimbus
massing in the west, those
sculpted edges alive with flaming gold
as the sun went down.
Tonight, as dusk fell
bringing cool relief to the sweating forest
I giddily inhaled a draught
laden with night-scented Jessamine.
And it is enough. Whatever may lie ahead
for this beloved bag of bones
the simple sensuous joy of being Presence
is enough.
Rainbow Lorikeet hovering. Photograph by Trevor Andersen.
So. Here we are. Sitting upon our lotus-leaf
pondering the paradox
that there is no inner and outer to this experience
of exist-ing.
Not only is the fabric of our being
felted from the Primordial Awareness we can’t
escape,
but every appearance we consider
‘other’
is similarly ex-pressed from that source.
And if there’s no inside/outside,
no this/that
no me/other
it means this:
We love to think that our quiet denial
of the pain too unspeakable to countenance,
is safely hidden from view.
Or, and this is more common,
we are no longer aware of it
as it vibrates below the limn
of our consciousness.
Perhaps we stitch together satisfying stories about
our awakened understanding.
(Or the absence thereof.)
Yet in moments of self-honesty we can see:
our scars go before us
laying out the trajectory of our lives.
Every stitch in the tapestry
of our magnificent ‘me’
is displayed across the cosmos.
All is known.
Because there’s nowhere for anything
to hide.
This is exquisite.
It’s a realisation that throws open the possibility
that the wound we have spent a lifetime
avoiding, can become the catalyst
for an unimaginable new View.
No inside/outside, remember?
No separation, remember?
Only One immeasurable inconceivable Whole is happening.
It’s like an eyeless eye.
It
knows Itself
intimately, lovingly
in all the discarded, denied details
of our every wound,
every misdeed and regret,
every choked-back emotion,
every failure to love…
so
we can come out
we can stand up
we can own up
we can shine
Sorry to shout. But this matters. Evidence of unintegrated primal pain is displayed for all to see across our world at this time. Imagine what the scene would be like if emotionally mature grown-ups were carrying the best interests of humanity forward, rather than beings frozen at the age of three? This is probably as close as I will ever come to making a political statement.
Image copyright Ma Deva Padma, Existence, from the Osho Zen Tarot
Here I am.
Sitting in Paradise
breathing.
Breathing the tide of clarity – in it comes
crystal-clear, out it goes,
often muddied by mind –
and I smile as this lifestream flows on
saturating each sensation, yet
paying no heed;
never cocking an eyebrow or casting a vote,
only ever reminding me:
Here I am
I-without-name-or-boundary
here and now
as This, and This and This.
The current version of Paradise finds me staying in a place of great beauty, beside a large lake. This entire year has unfolded as a series of deep retreats. It is a time for, and of, integration. Health issues are being lovingly tended and their emotional causality explored. It’s both harrowing and heart-swelling: Grace delivers whatever is needed, reminding me I signed up for the Full Monty.
Apropos of nothing (I never go fishing) these three small poems landed in my net:
breathing with the lake
I am
Monet-mind beside the Seine
–
black swans glide by, curious:
pounding the lakeside path
a rainbow!
–
fog hiding the lake
one solitary oarsman
rows through melting space
Photograph taken from my zafu.
echoes from emptiness 