The Swamp, the Lake and the Ocean

 One day she remembered. Through the misty swamps of her incredible journeys she saw an exquisite new flower budding at the surface of the otherwise muddy marshland and she moved closer to find out what it could be. How could something of such delicate beauty be rising from such dark waters?

And then she saw. And she stopped. Bemused by this unexpected encounter, she sat on the lush greenery at the edge of what had previously seemed a dreary mush of undefined nature and realized there was some sort of unexplainable harmony to this otherwise chaotic swamp.

There was Life! When she stopped to behold, she could finally see there had been a whole ecosystem of birth and death unfolding of its own accord, without the need for any guidance whatsoever. 

Everything here knew its function and place in each moment. There seemed to be no sort of plan. Just life happening in perfect synch.

Now that made her look inside to find out why she felt stuck in some inner recesses and yet free in other more visible landscapes. 

Aha! And that’s when she became aware of the children! So many of them caught up in cages that seemed to be safe but were however so confined. Caught in a stagnant loop in Time and Space, each child was living its own story and knew nothing about the rest. Entertained with survival, unaware there was something called Love, since Fear was the only side of existence they could grasp.

“Oh no!” She said to herself! Now that she had seen she could not pretend she hadn’t… But silently the Fear of Fear crept up from its usual abode in the corridors of her Mind and tainted her heart with a few instants of panic, as she suddenly had no idea how to release these children from their bondage.

She took a deep breath and once again focussed on the flower bud on the surface of the lake. Lake? Now it was a lake? Something strange was happening right before her eyes and her Mind was struggling to grasp the enormity of it. 

She sighed. She let go of the conundrum and chose to hold still, sitting in her inner garden, the safest place she had ever come across in all of her bold travels.

That’s when she felt it. It was warm and gentle. An embrace that her own breath had provided, an avenue of clarity where what she knew to be her wholeness had finally been allowed to hold her in the soft arms of Compassion.

Hummmm it felt soooo good! Her Mind quietened down. There was nothing to say right now. Just staying. Here. Now. In this absence of noise, where judgement found no place to grab onto. Where a new fragrance started to emerge. And the flower-bud started to unfold its petals and show a little more of its inner splendour.

She smiled. She knew she could Trust. Now she knew. She was witnessing Truth from within and nothing could make her turn her back on it ever again.

A new feeling was starting to fill her bloodstream as her body relaxed into Trust. Love was the name for it, but what was it really?

And she sensed. It was more. More than ever before. More of her True Essence. It was boundless. It had no restrictions of life, death, time or space… It was the eternal knowingness of Isness cascading into each cell of her Human form and she remembered even more. More and more and more. The void of homecoming.

Suddenly she knew no limitations that could justify these children’s cages and she sang the most beautiful song of forgiveness, for guilt no longer had a place in her heart and shame was with it, on its way out. The children could now come Home, no matter what they believed they were to blame for, no matter what rage was keeping them hostage, no matter what monsters they had been pretending to be. They could come. And she had arms that were endless and love that was unfathomable in its grace and grandness… 

She cried… Oh she cried so many tears of relief, as she had the courage to feel their pain, to listen to their anguish, to soothe their panic, to relieve their outdated burdens and to let them know it was finally ok. 

She had become the One who is Home for the many and no part was a lesser part of this Oneness. 

There could be no more division inside. Timelessness was urging her to reunite. Inviting her to Be that which she had always felt but never acknowledged herself entirely as worthy of. 

It had been just a game. However, it had brought about change of such massive proportions to the whole fabric of the Universe that nothing would ever go back to what it had been and no one knew what it was to become, for there was no plan, after all! All there was was this inevitable gravity of transcendence where Black and White are the sum total of all colours in-between and nothing can ever be lost. 

“Forever” now seemed different and “never” became a strange concept to sustain.

Meanwhile the flower on the pond… Now it was a pond… Had multiplied into more flowers than she could count and they were all wide open, glowing their inner glory out into the sky as the earth held and fed their roots with loving care.

Aha! So the Earth was infused with this same boundless love that her inner arms had spread out across the multitude of her experiences, bringing them into one coherent root for all of her blossoms to unfurl, entwining their beauty into all she could now perceive. The Mother carer of Spirit in flesh. So within, was it around her. So above, was it below.

Heaven! This was it and she didn’t need to go anywhere else to receive it. To live it. All she had had to do was stay. Quieten down. Allow love to spread its magic and accept that yes, it could be this simple.

Having allowed herself to embrace each and every single experience she had ever had, distilling it into the compassionate embrace of eternity, she could now finally let go of all she had been or known, to just be the entirety of herself now, discovering ultimate freedom in each new breath.

Gratitude became a permanent state and the pond morphed into an ocean so vast it had no edges. 

But the flowers, hummmm the flowers. Those were still there, colouring the surface with a fragrant beauty that could not be denied. Only accepted to just Be… And enjoyed in thankfulness for the magnificent pathway they indicated. They call them lotus flowers, these ones that rise from the mud into glory. Yet now there was no mud, and still they kept on rising and blooming. Blooming in the ocean, unconditioned by her past beliefs in the possibles and impossibles of existence.

And thus her steps became light as the breeze that carried her. 

She glided across the surface of her unfolding arrival. Joyful contentment. 

Fulfilled to the brink of ecstasy, she could want for no more, as it was definitely all here, all now.