No thoughts
about how perfect
or how awful it is,
can compete with the
flat fact of its arrival
each time we look again.

This is just the way of things:
This that comes to us
when we awaken each morning
lurch out of bed
and proceed
to whatever is next.

The way things are
slides by our window
on our daily commute,
showing up in all
those activities
our lives consist of.

Flowing with
the way of things
we receive all
that we are given.
we allow life to
be what it is.

Thus we are moved along
un-resistant, without protest,
like the water of a stream
moved by gravity
towards the sea.

Our lives come to us
as we flow along.
Our opportunities like rapids.
Our disappointments like eddies.
The work we have come for,
as a strong, clear
and ever-present current.

Do not be afraid.
We are being carried
by a force
mind cannot encompass.
All we can do is
move with it
willingly or not.

© 2010 Alice Gardner

If we have learned
Our lessons from life’s
Losses and failures, and
All that makes it worthwhile…

If we have learned
From our journey
And found the new fullness
Of our human-hood,
We begin to see
The patterns beneath
The surface of things.

Everywhere there is
Something that is lasting…
That doesn’t change
In the center of all
The changes made…
All along the journey
To what we are,
Where we are
In this moment.

Deep and untouchable
Divine patterning
Like arrows
Pointing always to
Something undefined by mind,
Something still
but in motion,
Not old or new.

Gathering both together
Seamlessly being
What has always been
In the unabashed
Nakedness of reality,
Just here, just this,
Unadorned.

© 2010 Alice Gardner

Tightly bound,
Each bud stands
Complete, still and perfect
Being a bud.
Yet there is movement too.
Imperceptibly the bud
Rests in the change,
The movement of opening.
Flourishing.

Still and at peace,
Being the epitome
Of life as it is
Simply as a bud.
Yet also it is
Pure motion personified
As slowly it opens
Into a full-flowered
Version of itself.

In the forest,
We find fiddleheads,
Perfect just as they are
At each moment
Of their unfurling.

Yet they slowly unroll,
Becoming the ferns
They somehow already are
In a vision far beyond
The thought of it.

Even the scent
Of springtime
Penetrates
The virtual world
Of thought,
Bringing us
To the real life
Where stillness
And motion meet,
And life comes
To its flowering
In us and around us.

© 2010 Alice Gardner

This is often seen when we also see that we are not our minds. We are something else even more wonderful!

We then can begin to see exactly how it is that our minds can cause us to lose touch with reality and go off on all sorts of tangents and suffer needlessly. This is a great turning point! When this is seen, then we are no longer simply at the mercy of whatever happens to us, but begin to accept the role of creator of our own experience.

The word has been out for decades that we create our own (mental) reality, but we can’t begin to be creative in this way until we see exactly how mind has habitually been ruling us.

We have fallen into a trap of believing the stories that mind has told us, believed the mentally mediated version of reality it fed us with for years. But we weren’t fooled. We weren’t satisfied. And now its rule is ending.

Many of us have been seeing through mind’s antics for years. And for many of us there remains a suspicion against mind, probably because of our 5000(?) year foray into egoic consciousness where we were so thoroughly led astray into suffering. There is a natural hesitancy about picking up mind now as a useful tool to be employed in the service of whatever life wants of us.

Yet these amazing tools we call our minds are the most wonderful instruments, able to calculate far beyond the capabilities of the smartest computer. Our minds are able to construct mental reality by using two (almost separate) hemispheres which perceive in very different ways to compile the information collected through the senses and then put them together and know what to do next!! How extraordinary!! What computer is capable of such sophisticated processing? None.

Without the guidance of something beyond itself however, mind seems to have hit a wall. We experience so much suffering from our having detached ourselves from our true nature while developing these minds. Yet now the world seems unable to proceed much further in the same direction without self-destructing. Out of necessity and the natural preference for survival, mind is being forced to abdicate its throne (to stop pretending to be in charge). Yet, with guidance from that which we are beyond thought, and with an attunement to the well-being of the whole, rather than the preservation of the ego, suddenly the possibilities for the future open wide.

A partnership between the two (inner guidance from what we truly are (call it God by any name) and the incredible usefulness of our amazing mental toolbox) is what will move this planet from the current critical status towards the kind of a future that we want for our children and grandchildren. And this movement is being driven by an evolutionary impulse to survive that we feel in both our archaic nature and our most modern facets. All that stands in the way are the vestiges of egoic identification which have to show themselves in order to be seen through. The way is open.

Our interpretations, beliefs and assumptions (which we are now able to be more or less aware of) have been fit together in a very automatic way to create perspective. We take a stand mentally. We adopt a position on issues that are important to us, deciding who is right and who is wrong, and whose opinion is the closest to truth as far as we can tell.

We may adopt the opinions of others because they feel right to us, or we may adopt independent positions directly from our own thinking processes. In both cases, what we are doing is relying on our mental processes directly or indirectly to tell us how to position ourselves in relation to the issues of our day. After all, having a personal perspective has been equivalent to more or less inflexible positionality up until now.

Without it being about right or wrong, our perspective on a simple object like a tree or a flower depends on where we are standing when we observe it. Similarly (until we are ready to move beyond this way of being) our perspective on the Israeli-Palestine conflict depends on what mental structures we are utilizing to think about what is happening. If we grew up in Isreal we would naturally as children have taken on the prevalent beliefs and assumptions of our families and communities in an age-old survival based maneuver designed to help us fit in. Our genes perhaps, but also certainly the social and cultural forces around us when we are developing our thinking naturally lead us to hold the perspective that we are given.

Another way of saying this would be to say that we are trained to conform to our genes and our cultures in order to survive to adulthood. If we were brought up in the Palestine we would also do this because we are also human, but the end result of course would be the taking of an opposing perspective.

A way out of the continuing conflict between two such opposing perspectives would be revealed when human capabilities began to develop to the point where the building and holding of perspectives is revealed as self-constructed and not reflecting the full reality of what is occurring. In fact whatever perspective we take reveals only a fraction of what is actually occurring until such time as we are able to hold them much more lightly and view situations from varying perspectives. This would be like an observer viewing an object from various angles, allowing it to be more fully seen, something that we naturally do with objects.

© 2010 Alice Gardner from her upcoming book “Making Sense of Tumultuous Times” (working title).

First book: “Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice” available on Amazon, as a kindle book, other ebook, or at your local bookstore by request.

“Although there is a lot of argument about the word evolution regarding the origin of the humanity (evolution versus the other creation stories) we will stand aside from the fray here and look at the subject a bit differently.

“If we consider human evolution in terms other than purely biological (such as in terms of our ability to learn new behaviors in order to survive) it is easy to see the movement of it all around us in our individual experiences. We are developing new thought processes, behaviors, skills and capacities as we go through whatever our lives bring us, both individually and collectively. This is the kind of human evolution that plays an integral part in our daily lives, only it shows up in such small increments that we rarely bring it into focus.

“We are taught in school about ‘natural selection’ and ’survival of the fittest’ in regards to evolution, but giving some focus to the ‘adaptation’ involved is a broader and less biological way to explore the relevance of evolution to our everyday lives. Adaptation is the capability we and other organisms have to adjust ourselves to new conditions when they appear in our environment (in order to be naturally selected or to survive). It is the ability to alter our way of life, our habits and our behaviors when it is necessary to do so for survival or for other things that matter to us. It is about our ability to meet each moment freely and creatively and to let go of old habits of thought or behavior.

“This world situation that we are facing is inviting us to let go of old fear-based thinking habits that have in the past formed our ways of thinking about the world and its problems. Our old ways of thinking have brought us to this point - a point beyond which they are no longer able to help us survive and thrive. Through seeing ourselves and the world from a perspective outside of our old filters and frames, our perceptions are altered and we naturally are freed from old outworn thinking and behaviors that no longer serve us. We are then able to adapt ourselves to the new environment presented by the times we live in, and become creative in our relationship with it.”

© 2010 Alice Gardner from her upcoming book “Making Sense of Tumultuous Times” (working title).

First book: “Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice” available on Amazon, as a kindle book, other ebook, or at your local bookstore by request.

If you read a recent front page story of the SF Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale that had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines.

She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth.

A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate ) and radioed an environmental group for help.
Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her.

They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.
When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles.
She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around…she was thanking them. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives.

The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.

May you, and all those you love, be so blessed and fortunate
to be surrounded by people who will help you get untangled
from the things that are binding you.

As for myself, I’m not big on partying for New Year’s. I like to take the transitional moment as a time to review, wrap up and clean out from the old year which always entails things like file cleaning and accounting. Then I like to look forward to what the new year may be wanting of me and get a general sense of direction.

This year I was given a Kindle for Christmas which was very fun because I had put a lot of effort into reformatting my book “Life Beyond Belief” into a Kindle edition, but had never even held a Kindle in my hand before. I’m loving my new Kindle and loving the publishing revolution that it and all the other e-book readers will for sure be bringing to us. These e-book reading tools open up the publishing world even further, so that anyone who has something to say that others are interested in can participate in the planetary conversation. Next I’ll be working on making my blog available as a Kindle blog that can be subscribed to on Amazon.

So, to all of you who got Kindles this Christmas along with me: Besides downloading my own book in Kindle format at Amazon, also check out Adya’s latest book, End of Your World here. Adya’s book is a very wonderful guide to what he calls embodiment, which is really what Wide Awake Living is all about: bringing one’s awakening down into the everyday thoughts, actions and interactions that our daily family, community and work lives consist of.

In 2010, the Wide Awake Living website will be seven years old. It all started when a tenant who was also a friend lost her job and couldn’t pay rent so she paid part of it by teaching me how to make a website. I had experienced a major shift in the fall of 02 and was just starting to write about it. The original writing is still up there online, but the site has grown a lot since then and it led to this newsletter.

Lately I’m learning how the internet is a way for all the people who are working with the various aspects of the next evolutionary leap for humankind to connect up and stay connected. It may be that this newsletter and the various things I do on Twitter, Facebook etc can be a support to people who are themselves making this evolutionary leap out of the mind-made self that has hitherto confined us, and into the awesome wonder of what is.

A New Earth

Stand up, wake up!
New possibilities have arrived
For these lives we had thought were our own.

The possible human stands free now
Of its past constraints,
The cage it grew up in, that served it well,
Trembling now with wonder at what it sees.

Old habits of mind fall away like old skin
No longer needed, no longer helpful
Outgrown and abandoned.

A different world, a new earth
Comes into view, fresh and alive
By a change of perception,
A new way of seeing.
We are joined together now
In a new maturity
A new awareness of how it is,
How we are carried on a new wind,
And a new response stirs.

Old habits of mind
Want to box and label
What is seen,
Safely containing
All things, all experience,
In the known world.

But a new wind
Blows through the mind
Not looking for refuge from life.
Seeing beyond itself
Into the alive world
Of happenings and presences,
Mysterious and unfathomable.
So far beyond thought
That mind lies down
In the deepest bow possible
Dumbfounded and reverent.

Then rising again,
From its bow
In hopeful adoration
Only wanting to serve
What it doesn’t understand.

by Alice Gardner   9/19/09