Sequoia 5

Dear Sequoia, they say it's the darkest before the dawn.  I think that is meant to give us hope in the most bleak of moments...and...I also hope that it also is just true.  Let the madness give way to the sunshine.  Let the intensity give way to the play.  

I was thinking about you today, and I thought about you yesterday as well.  I was watching a man hold his daughter and I felt into what he must be feeling, and it made me laugh.  What a crazy feeling it is to feel that kind of love and devotion.  This little girl was ready for anything, ready to take on life and show us the way.  I feel like that's how it is right now, I look to you for guidance. You are the the beacon in the distance.  I look towards you and feel grounded, you ground me.

I am about to graduate from graduate school, my life is in huge transition.  I don't know that my life has ever not been in transition.  It seems like everything I do is leading me radically to the next thing, only this time i can't imagine what is coming next.  Life is a wonderous unfolding of the most random of events, you just never know what you're going to get, who you're going to become.  I wonder what kind of world I'm creating for you....i mean the world at large, the world you will live in, but I also mean the world in me.  I hope I am becoming the kind of man that can be the kind of father that will give you the kind of life that you want to live.

I can hear you laughing at me.  You're wondering why I'm being so pedestrian about how i see life and children and parents when you know I don't actually see it that way.  I don't know.  Because...sometimes the traditional roots me enough to make the practical happen.  If i didn't root into any tradition I might just float away like embers.  But I know that you are coming with an agenda, like we all do.  I know you are going to be on the earth in the way you need to be.  I know that my role will be to not get in your way and support you in every way I can as you explore and unfold.

I have learned a lot about the journey of being human, and I so hope it will be useful to someone.  Every step I've walked has mattered.  Every minute I've wasted was worth wasting...because in truth, it has all mattered.

I don't know where your Mom is right now.  I will be seeing her tomorrow, she is coming for my graduation but she is on another planet...unreachable to me.  Please send her love and light, support and inspiration, kindness and generosity, openness and a desire to use it.  She needs you.  She doesn't know you like I know you, but she needs you more than she knows.

Okay beautiful girl, I have to go to bed.  Whatever comet you're riding on, be safe, be free, be wild, and come to me when you're ready....and when I'm most ready for you.

all my love,

mikey

Surrender

Life and love, play and work, passion and talent, simplicity and complexity, large goals and small achievements....what happens when you come to a place in your life when it all just opens up?  i mean what do I do when suddenly the path is completely open.  What has needed to be done is done, what has needed preparation has had it.  The ground is set to step in any direction.

I was thinking the other day about how we are not actually free beings.  We are born onto the earth and are hopefully told that we can be whatever we want to be when we grow up.  But that's just not the way it is, because it's not the way of 'things'.  While we may not be determined, we are specific.  Have you ever looked more deeply into your astrology?  Pick up an astrology book and read through all the signs of the Zodiac, there will be one or two of you that will feel like they are describing your personal autobiography.  There may be one or two others that you kind of resonate with if you're a open person, and the rest of them will feel foreign.  This is because we aren't, and cannot be all things in the human form.

We incarnate not to be all things.  In the world of god and light, angel and spirit, soul and cosmos, all things are One, probably in the most literal sense of the word.   There is probably the feeling of the most profound interrelatedness even amidst our also present individuality.  Here, individuality is why we're here.  We are here to have certain experiences the soul is longing to have to evolve as a spirit being....which all of us are.  Our 'choices' then are not limitless, we cannot be whatever we want to be when we grow up, we are actually drawing from a relatively small pool of available reality when we make the choices we make.  the rest of it doesn't interest us.

This is good! Feel into this for a moment.  What if it were true that literally everything interested you and everything were equally available for your to pursue via your talents, passion, and interest.  How would you ever make a decision in which direction to go?  The inherent limitations that your soul gives you is actually freedom designed to give you peak experiences in what is really a very short life.

So what happens when you have harnassed, cultivated, pursued, broke down, tuned up, prepared the parts of you that are yours in this lifetime?  So, what i mean is, there is a whole lot of YOU ready to take a next step but the path still isn't clear because now there is an ease about how you feel about 'what you want to do' and you're just kind of open?

For me this is where the rubber meets the road, this is where it really gets interesting in terms of cosmos meeting incarnate.  This is the time when, i think, it takes the most spiritual presence and listening that you have ever mustered in any of your explorations.  Because, in a way, it doesn't matter what you do.  You've been prepared to do whatever it is you're meant-to-do and it's time to make yourself available to just do it.  'Meant to do', for the record, is not an easy concept for me to accept.  I don't like the idea of meant-to-do because it rigidly implies that we are not the captains of our own ships....not really.  It implies that we are fulfilling some kind of an agenda of someone/something else.

That is one valid way of seeing it.

Feeling into it another way though, if we are souls playing around in the Oneness, and we do incarnate for the sake of furthering our spiritual beingness, and our 'choices' are limited because we are coming here to experience certain things during this particular incarnation, then why wouldn't it be that we are meant to be doing something? Meant to be, in that sense, then is the culmination of why we came here in the first place.  So while it doesn't feel like it is entirely 'our' choice from the mortal perspective, from the perspective of the spiritual Self, from the soul level apriori incarnation, it makes perfect sense.  Who we are did not begin here in the flesh.  Who we are, was, before we were born, at the behest of who we Are in the realm of soul and spirit.

What you are meant to do is complete what you started long before you came here.  No one was 'meant' to work at Walmart.  Walmart or the post office or thousands of jobs that people show up at to make money to afford to life or raise their family or whatever.  The circumstances of their lives are meant to provide the platform to connect them to the Self they are in the heavens.  And this is where choice is radical:  you have to do your work.  In this lifetime, you have to do your radical preparation/exploration work in order to get to the meant to place.

So what do you do when you come to the place of having it all laid before you?  how do you next choose?  it seems like the choices have come to a kind of cadence?  this is where you call upon yourself as Spirit in the most profound and direct way you maybe ever have before.  Maybe it's time for you to meet your spirit self, and let yourself be lovingly guided to whatever it is you're meant to do.  Because you're right, it doesn't matter what you 'do' from the perspective of how your mortal self feels about it.  at this point, you are beyond the need for that kind of satisfaction.  the choice you have to make isn't a choice to be made from the mortal level, because you have in a very real sense merged with your spirit self, and it's only your spirit self who has the grand picture of YOU, and what you're up to in this incarnation clearly in its sites.

This is a new kind of trust, a new kind of leap, and the next step for you.  Feel into the radical spirit being you are, and let your future emerge from it.  There is no going back, i'm sorry to say.  That's just the truth.  And you wouldn't want to knowing everything you now know.  Yes this place you're in is uncomfortable, and somewhat frightening, but aren't all places of real growth kind of unsettling?  we get very used to who we are as whatever beings we've come to see ourselves as.  To let that go for what might be emerging, is quite a gesture of love, surrender and trust to greater picture of all that is, evolution itself, the destiny of life, and how your little role in it makes a profound difference.

Dear Sequoia 4

Dear Sequoia,

It makes me happy just to write to you.  To think about you, to write to you, to imagine you.  I wonder what it will be like when you read these letters?  i wonder if you will know the journey your Mom and I went on to come to you?  It is the most important thing i've done in my life....this journey to you.  In making the journey to you, I am making a radical journey to me.

I am in San Francisco right now, finishing up my last month of graduate school. I'm getting my masters degress in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness.  I wonder if you'll be interested in this kind of stuff on day?  The Universe, Creation, Cosmic play, great thinkers who have tried for thousands of years to understand the nature of reality.  We try to answer the big questions, about purpose and meaning.  

But you know what?  it's funny, since you came into my life, those questions matter less.  My whole i have been interested in those kinds of questions and I think I always will be.  But you know what else?  What i've also noticed my whole life is that at the end of each day, what matters most is Love.  It's funny writing this to you because I don't know what it will sound like when you read it one day.  What will it sounds like.  Love.  The importance of Love.  Will it mean something?

As much as I love what i'm studying, as much as I love traveling around the world, and playing, and as much as I love the adventure, i love Love more.  i love your mom more than I can express to you.  And it is our love for one another that is bringing you here to us.  Isn't that amazing?  We are drawing you forth right now by our loving each other.

Your Mom is in our home in Los Angeles right now, we are still taking space from one another. But I want you to know I saw her last week and when I did she said 'i was in the bathroom the other day and i looked up at the painting on the wall that you and i painted and i felt how perfect that painting is going look in CeCe's room.'  Your Mom calls you CeCe.  Although I don't know how we're going to spell it yet.  But I just wanted you to know she's thinking about you, she loves you so much, and just like me she can't wait for you to be here.

Love, Sequoia.  I hope I can teach you that.  I hope your life teaches you that and I hope your Mom and I always put love first....love for one another, for our friends and family, for you, and for the Earth.  Love really is the only thing that creates lasting change and healing, the only thing that can radically transform, empower, melt, and inspire.  Just the thought of you inspires me.  I am sending you love across time, across dimensions, across probabilitites, across the universe to where you're waiting for us.

i love you CeCe!

me

Heart Wins.

I still think of you, relative to everything.  I don't know why.  It can't be love.  Love isn't present enough, not in anything besides the fantasy anyway.  The fantasy is strong, oh so strong; soul-cripplingly strong; stop me in my tracks and thrown my life into a tailspin strong.  What is the love then?  is it love?  Can it be that I just don't want to loose?  loose you?  or just loose?  how can it be love if the love isn't returned, if we're standing on unkindness and untruth?  how can it then be love?

Does love require maturity to be real love?  If it does, then what is it before it's mature?  not real?  tell that to a kid in high school who has his heart broken for the first time.  Tell him that his love isn't real because he's not mature enough to experience real love.  Maybe it's not about maturity, maybe it's just about one person, and another person, and their ability to see one another instead of just seeing themselves.

What hasn't been said about love?  what hasn't been felt?  what hasn't been described because it's always been indescribeable, just out of reach of words or even music.  I don't know now, the decisions of my head, if they should be trusted over the feelings of my heart.  my heart doesn't censor, my heart just IS, fully and beautifully, in this dance of life.  It tells me what it feels, and because of the nature of MY heart, the very lucky nature of my heart, it will always make room for the goodness, and let the badness melt away, slip away, slip into the background as if it never happened at all.  But that isn't happiness.  That isn't happy.  What is it?  It's a way of feeling deeply the truth of the heart while not acknowledging the truth of life.  We don't, can't, live on heart alone.  That isn't the experience of life.  It's not what life IS.  we ARE heart.  But we are also Mind, and Spirit, and Soul.  We are also a composite of our collected experience in this lifetime and others, and all of this matters when we make choices about how to live.

I LIVE.  it's true, i so passionately live, so deeply and boldly live, and  feel my heart beating and being torn apart and then soaring, and then being crushed and wrenched, and then being saved and held and loved by strangers.  but not by you.  and it doesn't matter if it's by you, because you always win.  you will always win....because that what my heart says should happen.  It says that you should always win, and so you do.  will i then be forever unhappy?  or will everything change one day?  Am I betting everything on one game?  or am i learning from this one game in which I am betting everything, how to LIVE?  I may loose it all.  And I may win it all right back, in the most miraculous of transformations.  What am i willing to risk?  I suppose everything?  right?  what else would be the point of being alive?

I look so forward to playing in consciousness.  but will the game be as alive?  this is alive what i'm doing now, and more uncertain than anything i could have bargained for, but it's without joy.  I never wanted....this.  not like this.  so why do I stay playing this kind of game if it's not what i wanted, and it's not what i want, and i know it so clearly?  because, love wins.  the heart, wins.  love will always win.  the heart will always have the final say....until i have learned that true integration is not just with another person to form a healthy partnership, but true integration is with the Self.  all parts of me, all the time.  what will be given up meanwhile, will be so many things i don't want to give up.  but what i will gain, will be numinous, electrifying, because it will be the purest the universe has to offer because everything else will have been turned away.  now it's just me and the universe.

Still though, now, and always, magic is possible too.  What magic can happen must be given space to happen in.  time and space, patience and trust.  magic can, will, does, show up and transform, it is the way of things.  great leaps for unknown reasons.  Yes, it happens, yes it's real, yes.

Yes....and.

Dear Sequoia 3

Dear Sequoia,

Your Mom and I haven't spoken in three weeks.  I can't tell you how strange it is.  I received a painting from her though, and it's dedicated to you.  She sends me paintings to let me know I am still in her heart, while she takes this break, but she wants to remind me of her and of you in the paintings she sends me.  Isn't that beautiful?  you are going to love her.

She loves you so much.  You can't know right now how much she loves you, but if you could, you would be overwhelmed.  What she is doing right now, in being apart from me, she is doing for you.  She is becoming her Self. She is living in the world of mystery and uncertainty.  She is risking everything, in a way, because she really doesn't know if I'm going to be waiting for her when she's done.  And by risking me, she's risking you.  But she's doing it because she loves you so deeply.  She knows she needs to become the person she needs to become, and the person you need her to become in order to be your Mom, and she can only do it through these fires and trials of life she's taking on.  Isn't that amazing?

I think of her all day long....and the days are long while we're apart.  But what i see when I think of her is a being so courageous, so full of heart and adventure, that getting to be born to her you are going to come into a life that is going to blow you away.  I think of you every day my sweet baby.  I can almost smell your skin, like I can smell your mom's.  your brightness is blinding, and I have no idea how to express to the universe my gratitude for you.  You are the greatest gift of my life.

love,

me

Love, Lost, or Not At All

Is it better to have loved and lost, than to not have loved at all?  that comes from a poem written in 1850.  well, it's kind of sentimental Hallmark-y, here in 2009, in our age of new-cynicism and reality TV.  But I bring the question up because I just kind of said something similiar out loud, randomly, in reference to my partner, who is apart from me, on her journey, doing whatever she's doing, somewhere in the world without me.  I just sent her a text and told her 'I wish I could hug your heart tonight.'  And I probably won't get a response from her....because she's on her journey....and that might sting....and no matter how I show-up....we might not end up together....but....the thing is....I LOVE.  I love.  Love is a choice, and I choose to love.

It's hard to articulate this.....because it's so....seemingly doormat-y.  It gives her, or anyone else who might attempt this path, room to be whatever kind of asshole they want to be.  I don't know what to say other than....there is some kind of wisdom, some kind of gift, some kind of strength and courage in giving someone ultimate space.  There is nothing easy about it....although...I suspect that it may get easy after doing it for a time.  you just keep on keeping on with the love and space and allowance.  You keep on keeping on while checking in with yourself to make sure you are not selling your soul down the river meantime.

I have sold my soul down the river.  I have done the sacrificing thing while paying the price of spirit stripping, eye sucking, expectation of some kind of return.  The 'trick' is, if it can be called a trick, is to find the space in yourself where what you're doing, you're doing because you you believe it is a way of being in the worthy of scrutiny, a way of being that will stand the test of time, a way of being that is based on the higher good and the greatever evolution of everyone involved....no matter how crazy it seems.

Everyone wants to tell you to get out, you don't deserve this, you are a great person and should be loved, lots of stuff that has to do with what's yours and what's coming to you.  But what is YOUR life based on?  what do you want to communicate through your spirit to the rest of the world?  the doormat thing is not not-real.  There is a point where we can recognize a loosing battle or that we are being taken advantage of....BUT....there is all kinds of space before then where your partner can unfold in a very fucking difficult reality that even THEY can't articulate as they're trying to go through it.  There is space you can hold, there are choices you can make that are life enhancing.  You can hold them in a greater idea of what they may become in their exploration than you currently what to hold them in.

Why?

Because.  At the end of the day....no matter HOW you slice it....what it comes down to...in the ideal version of life and love is....what Jesus or any of the great teachers would have done....Allow and Love.  The thing about allowing in loving is that you have to find a space in yourself that actually let's you do.  So you can't 'do it' AND at the same time be resenting doing it.  It actually has to be there fully, with full resonance, so you can fully participate.  This come from seeing the world, reality, life, spirit presence, with such a wide angle lens, with such vision, that the small machinations of someone's 'actions' don't effect the way of spirit, the way of the warrior.  you are choosing this because no one else is choosing it.  it is a gift beyond measure, to yourself and to the person on the other end other end of the receiving....and the example it is to everyone around you.

But you do it because you believe it...because you CAN do it.  it's like playing the violin or painting, you do it because it's your gift and you're meant to use it.  I wish the best for you, i hope it all goes your way at the end of the day and your investments pay off, and your journey is colored with great love and shiny life and beautiful people from these high, high, choices you're making.  That may or may not be so.  I wish it so for you, and give the universe gratitude in advance that it works out that way.  But if it doesn't, the path that you choose is as vital as it is no matter what.  Nelson Mandela was in jail for 27 years before he became the president of south africa.  that time....what probably more than a quarter of his life.  Was it a waste?  did it pay off because he became president?

l love because I love.  I choose to love because my love follows where my heart leads and my Self chooses to go.  I love her because i do.  I want her because I'm meant to.  I show up because my greatest challenges come in her eyes.  I am allowed this lifetime because we're meant to do this dance, and I see that, i feel that, and I want that, no matter what.  so of course i give her everything, of course I offer her years, of course I offer her the more raw and barest parts of myself.  Of course i will hang, and dangle, and swing, as she uncovers the language of her soul for the first time.  Of course I will.  Why wouldn't I?  is there anywhere more interesting in the world to be?  maybe, but i only have eyes for her...because I am looking with the eyes of my heart...and what they see is the unfolding cosmos, wrapped up in the pink and black and white of perfection.

Scalding Sidewalk in New Jersey

Right.  okay.   I always forget how hard the first week is without her.  it's with drawl, like from some kind of serious drug.  she is crystal meth maybe, and I can't help but feel the pain as her smell fades from my room, as the feel of her cheek in my hand becomes slightly less visceral, as our energies separate.  and since I can't have my meth, I have tequila.  don't know which one is worse....or better.  it's a funny thing to be in love with someone...to feel that sense of addiction to them....to want what you want FROM them....instead of just being WITH them.  that's why situations like these are invaluable, they are so instructive because they keep the dynamic REAL.  

I mean to say that because of this situation I am kept real.  I am not allowed to fool myself into believing that I am just easefully in love.  No, I'm not.  I am in love for sure, but I am also attached, I am also addicted to 'getting' something from her that i 'need.'  Is this co-dependence? Co-dependence smacks of desperation, it heralds in the devouring sense of my-life-makes-no-sense-without-this-person;  And while from an esoteric point of view that's true, she and I have always had our own lives, experiencing reality in separate ways, and include each other only some of the time.  I THINK in the face of loosing each other...we have become MORE co-dependent....in the sense that dependence is somewhat hinged on desire.  We WANT to be together, so there is a dependence on taking care of the 'us' while the 'I's' are doing what they need to do.  It is a kind of protection, knowing that life does/is/tries to always give us more.  MORE is often misleading, and when you know what you want you just don't want to be mislead...at least not hopelessly so.   Loosing her, loosing us, loosing our life together....I don't fear that anymore.  I do get caught up in what life can do, will do, must do at times.  Even still, I think we're going to wind up together, make it through this.  But what comes up for me now is how?

I'm not really asking 'how'.  There's no way to imagine how the universe will work it out...it will be astonishing, I get that.  So what I mean by how is, how am I going to BE/LIVE/DO my life in the next year while all of this unfolds.  Not having the drug will get easier, it always does after we're apart for a while.  But....the deeper feeling there is how will i live into me....when 'I' stand still, still wanting to be with her while she's journeying? 

 What does sadness speak?  the yearning of a pure heart?  the wail of an unrequited clarity?  or is 'sadness' a default more reaction to not getting what I want?  As deeply as I feel for her, there is also a sense that all my sadness is unnecessary and could in fact be its opposite.  Allowing is giving.  To love is to free.  To let go is to evolve.  All of these are causes for celebration not sadness.  No love is lost in the process, in fact more is born through the act of self-less beingness.  'Self-less' not in the martyr paradigm but in the sense that the self is not making the choices here, rather the Self is.  The 'S'elf is actually self-LESS because the Self holds big picture vision and chooses from the greater love and experience of Oneness than the 's'elf is able to conceive or hold.

My heart breaks at the idea of loosing my baby and soars at the idea of my baby gaining herself...everyday a step closer to the possible reality we might share.  but even if we don't, she still gains herself and flies in the face of traditional world values by the very nature of her courageous journey, and my joy is living the edge with her, if i can just find the joy in it.

LIFE is PARADOX.  The MIND is NOT the HEART.  The EGO is NOT the SPIRIT.  Mind and Ego hold tight to patterns and wishes and it takes concentration and deep desire for life to LIVE IN US differently than those forces allow.  HEART and SPIRIT will give and allow and free and celebrate.  Mind and Ego will demand, deserve, and entitle, and 'make sense' of the situation.  And so this journey of heart and spirit is solo and audacious, without acknowledgment and maybe too without reward or practical fulfillment, rather the fulfillment may be in some kind of progression playing out years or decades or lifetimes from now.  that's why finding the JOY in my choices (sinking in to heart and spirit) has to be the reward in itself, somehow knowing that eliciting a greater sense of beingness is where we want to go as individuals and as a culture.  Love isn't love.  Love is LOVE.

God, I love being in love.  I resent my dysfunction and non-clarity around it.  But even when it's not clear it's still GREAT.  can you imagine what it would be like in all it's true depth and clarity?  i barely can.  I don't know if I've ever experienced it.  But I'm here for it now, stripping my layers and laying naked on the scalding sidewalk in July in New Jersey, having the cosmos bake it out of me...all of it....all that needs to go in order to make room for what the transformation is offering to bring in.