At breakfast, reading the international news on my laptop, thinking, ‘I am connected.’
Thinking, as I sip from my mug of tea. Sitting, still except for my eyeballs scanning the flat screen for information to feed on, mug held just off my lips, embodied. I notice a movement in my core. An alert. Something is wrong.
My mind alerted from my heart is looking, searching for clues to what is wrong, not looking for what is right to magnify. Why look for what is wrong when the solution is to magnify what is right? Looking to put boundaries on ‘what is wrong’ is a temporal lobe problem in an overactive brain, overfed, unbalanced and bloated with information that a sedentary man can do nothing about. That is the problem. That is what my mind has received a heart level alert about. “Hear me,” it says.
I make a choice to take this seriously, and not merely to discount it into denial and play the ‘be sensible’ game, getting on with the routines. Something is wrong. It needs putting right.
“Show me,” I let my mind say to whatever depths of source my heart is connected into. “What news have you to bring to my attention?”
I suddenly notice a flash of yellow just above my laptop screen. I lift my eyes. And the deep green beside it comes into focus with the yellow solitary rose in its display vase on the kitchen table, a gift from a long term friend’s garden to Marian, my wife. The spray of leaves is quietly drawing water up through the dark firm stem and pulling the air in from this room. Thus the rose is connected to its deeper source. The source is all around us all. There is no excuse. The solution is everywhere if we but look.
And look my heart did, now guiding thought. It brought into focus a picture on a magazine cover lying just behind the rose’s vase. “Open Doors”, the magazine cover said silently in text, and below it a picture of a burnt out church building, windows of gaping soot and fallen timbers black and broken inside, the gaping double door portal wide open like a mouth in agony, black tonsils, grey sky visible beyond. I suddenly realised… that was the alert my heart had seen when my mind was narrowed down onto a 2D display of closed circuit newsfeed sucking me in. Open doors…
I find my senses now are all becoming more alive. I become aware of my posture and areas of unnecessary tension or inattention. My breathing becomes a spiritual exercise. Now I am thinking more clearly. And to my surprise I notice something else that must have always been there while preparing my tea and opening the screen. I notice the aroma of the rose beside the burnt out church. Can you smell it now, I wonder?
Two words come to mind simultaneously. They are compassion, and presence. This yellow rose is not called Compassion, which is a beautiful pink-red bloom with a slightly different scent. It is called Golden 50th Wedding Anniversary, which Marian had chosen as a bush to give as a present from us to our friends a year before. Like a breath in shared life, the bloom had returned. And here it gave forth its scent day and night unnoticed, until its presence is noticed beside the blackened shell on the magazine cover, like a chrysalis carcass on the ground shed behind some miraculous transfiguration flight into resurrection life.
I am reminded of the talk I gave online last night about being the presence of loving kindness as the state of fulfilled human wholeness. Going straight for the solution may be important, to magnify what is right. The loving kindness of compassion is all around us, always, mostly unnoticed because our brain’s temporal lobes make us focus on the problem, turning it into an ‘it’ when it really is a relational dynamic problem of compassion distorted by narrow mindedness. We breathe the solution, and swim in movement’s warmth.
Being the presence of loving kindness is not simple. Those three concepts all have a polarity. Love is known both as joy and as grief. Kindness can be the warmth of responsiveness and also the setting of boundaries so that people know where they stand. Presence can be intimate and also remote as the quality of trust alive in present moment decisions for action or restraint. Being, being in this state of uncertainty, is a constant path of exploration in conversational exchange with our three environments, physical, social and spiritual. We breathe in all of them, and in breathing we release our scent to mingle with the scent of wholeness, which is the shared movement of compassionate action as best we can.
Magnifying solutions… I turn away from the 4D rose by the 2D burnt out church to my laptop screen, and open Word in a new tab, and start typing a post for my Substack, tea put to the side. https://TriquetraLife.substack.com .
