C.M. Rivers

Alchemy

The peacock struts around eating things that are brightly colored: plants, insects and snakes.

Much of what it eats is poisonous.

May we learn to move closer to pain, invite in the Lady of Sorrows to sit it at our table, as if she were our neighbor, as if she were a weary vagabond in need of food and shelter, and we were a Spanish Mission.

Then we might be something like the peacock, whose tail-feathers are alchemized by poison into something bright and beautiful.

No Rush

You don’t have to rush. You don’t have to be in such a hurry all the time. You don’t have to feel pulled in a hundred different directions. It’s only the energy of the society around you, and has nothing to do with the conversation your life makes with the world.

When you give up the habit of rushing and the need to be in control, it creates space in you for peace.

Notice how any system has rules and limitations, and must operate within its own boundaries in order to control effectively. Notice how weak – or how strong – any single aspect of a system becomes when approached in a non-systematic way, or when it is removed from the system to which it belongs, revealing just how limiting a system can be.

Fear, desire, and the need to be in control are like obstructions in a river, blocking the full potential of the water’s flow. You can always be less rigid and more fluid, less like stone and more like water.

To live less systematically – and let go of the rush – is to allow the space and flexibility for peace to flow more abundantly into your life.

“May I be the tiniest nail

in the house of the universe.

Tiny, but useful.”

Mary Oliver

Making Use of Heat

C.M. Rivers

Then you come to that place of burning through the atmospheric fabric of consciousness. You learn how to make use of the intensity of heat, and you use it to burn through thoughts and emotions, fears and desires, to purify and transform.

Because you are not your thoughts, emotions. You are not the sum of your fears and desires, however enslaved to them you perceive yourself to be. You are a thread in the fabric of consciousness. You are part of the awareness that witnesses all things in this field of time, this dimension of duality.

So you can stop trying to hold on to your identity as it is defined by others. You can start to let go of how others might see you, how they might judge you. And you can start to release your own judgments, assumptions, and misconceptions about others.

You might arrive at a place…

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Making Use of Heat

You might arrive at a place of thunderstruck stillness in yourself, a calm quiet place that has always been there, somewhere, like the surface of a pool of still water, or maybe the eye of a storm. All the great importance of your external environment is diminished in this place of being at rest within yourself, this sensation of coming home to your own heart, this peaceful pause in the wake of the ten-thousand things.

It’s a place where no one owes you anything, and you don’t owe them. A place free of demand or expectation. A place of clarity, blindingly brilliant, where you can see a little more clearly what it is to be human. Because each time you make an individual self-discovery, you discover something about humanity in the process.

There is a revelatory quality in your experience of self-discovery that is unique to you, but you are also simultaneously connected to all those who have made the same discovery, all around the world, down through the ages. You are connected to those who have not been born yet, and those who are here now, shedding their own brands of light.

Quote by Erich Schiffman

“When you let go of everything you think you know about yourself and stay with what’s left, when you willingly abandon the contradictory evaluations of who you are and courageously reach deeply into yourself in order to experience yourself directly, you will come upon a new experience of who you are.”

Erich Schiffman

Hopi Prayer

This summer I hope to visit the place I scattered my mom’s ashes 26 years ago, near the foot of Neahkhanie Mountain on the Oregon coast. Standing in the wind above the sea, I will be sure to remember this Hopi Prayer.

“Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on the ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning hush, I am the swift uplifting rush

of quiet birds in circle flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am not there. I did not die.

My Spirit is still alive.” – Hopi Prayer

Rasa

(Rasa is a Sanskrit word literally meaning juice, essence, or taste. It also refers to an ancient concept in Indian arts concerning the aesthetic of a composed piece of visual, literary, or musical work. More specifically, Rasas are the feelings evoked in the reader or audience by the artistic work.)

Your life, this life, not separate. Rather, linked to all others. Are you the creator or the creation? Are you the central character or the chief spectator?

You are the witness, the audience, ever in the throes of each Rasa rising up within you. Where is your Vismaya, your wonder – your Adbhuta, astonishment? Ruled by the strange, the sad, the sharp and cold, the soft and warm. Governed by your smile, tears, the metronome of your heart.

You prepare tea, walk dogs, read books, drink water from a clear glass, and none of these things are ordinary, though often mistaken as such.

The world is at once a utopia and wasteland. I have watched bodies become prisons – the bodies of those I have loved. I have watched minds become solitary confinement. I have watched myself twist and turn, bend over backwards, push on and on.

Sometimes I wonder, will we not truly see one another until after we have passed onward and inward? Such is the light of a star upon the brows of the earthbound.

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