Change

Goodbye to all that

Tomorrow I pack and leave a 23-year old marriage. It’s a relationship that has spanned 29 of my 44 years: a big chunk of my life. Why leave? To be free. To explore. To be alone in the universe. To learn to live this life in another way. To walk the road less travelled. To live unfulfilled dreams. To travel light upon the earth in a way that marriage and parenthood and others’ expectations haven’t permitted.

There are dreams of writing and travelling and living and working in other places, other countries. But most of all, I want to develop a relationship with myself that has eluded me. And to do learn to do this I must live apart and alone. I intend to devote myself to living a life a presence: abandoning ego and mind to live a life of consciousness, compassion, gratitude, joy, love and sacredness.

There is too much history where I now live. And too much future. By that I mean that I am haunted by the ghosts of a three-decade old relationship. I find myself being reminded too frequently of my failures, my transgressions, my sins. I’d like to believe that I am none of these things: that I am not my failures (or my successes). Yet looking forward, all I see is more of the same. I will not participate in the madness, the pain, the loathing, the unconsciousness any longer.

In the past month I have read and re-read Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now. For too long, I’ve believed that my dysfunctional marriage was principally my doing, and that it was my responsibility to fix it. I’ve been told the same many times: as soon as I get my head together, our relationship can improve and prosper. Reading Tolle has revealed to me that the two of us have colluded in not speaking our deeper truth. That we have spent our time together mostly striking out and reacting from our unconscious wounded egos.

Now I see that I am not simply my little ego. In essence, I am something much greater and deeper. I am part of the life force of the universe. I am not separate. And I do not need to fight to protect my ego: my “boundary”: myself. “I am,” as Van Morrison says in The Waiting Game, “the brother of this snake.” I am connected to the flowers, the sky, the wind, the trees and the ocean. I am cosmic conscious dust and must die (before I die) to the fiction that “I think, (and feel), therefore I am.” If I keep believing and feeding my mind/ego, which lives on judgements and concepts and ideas and preferences and attachments, I am doomed to eternal suffering: sadness, anger and fear.

Goodbye to all that, As Robert Graves once said. Instead, my new mission is this: “I create a conscious world by living in the timeless realm of present-moment awareness.”

Nature knows the power of now

Sydney’s first MKP Purification & Renewal Ceremony

The winter solstice marked the occasion of the Sydney MKP community’s first purification and renewal ceremony near Thirlmere, an hour’s drive southwest of Sydney. The solstice is that times of year when -- in our hemisphere -- the Earth’s axis is most tilted away from the sun, representing our seasonal mid-winter.

Brett, John, Ted & Dan celebrated the event, while Peter, Daniel, Rick & Denis sent their heartiest blessings. Set in a lovely bush setting, the new lodge is a plain structure made from she-oaks. It’s an intimate configuration, built on a levelled piece of ground that runs down a hillside to a trickling stream. In its current form it will probably accommodate a dozen or so people.

All kinds of spirits came to bless the occasion: black cockatoos crowed their greetings; wombats marked our site with green droppings; and bush wallabies crashed about in the darkened bush, while our blazing fire cast ghostly shadows on the towering fire-scorched gums that border the site. Below, the gully sang a hushed siren song of distant ocean shores, strewn with weed and kelp and magnificent pearly shells.

Inside the lodge, grandfathers hissed: “The place is here! The time is now! Speak your truth, for it is welcome in this place of darkness.” As always, the steamy purifying heat drew lazy beads of sweat from our invisible bodies. Descending now, we left chronological time behind as we spoke to the lover, warrior, magician and sovereigns within. We had entered a portal to kairos time – that wonderfully dreamy space-place somewhere being and non-being.

Stories and songs and questions and tears and laughter swirled and flowed around and through us, as the un-manifest became manifest. No past. No future. Just the simple power of now-ness. Utterly present. Intensely alive. Deeply conscious. Blissful. Peaceful.