I listen, to permit the flow.

I listen, to remember there is something to remember.

I listen, to receive my life.

I made a nice drawing today. I thought you’d want to know and be happy with me. Because I know this about you, you are happy when I’m happy and that increases my happiness to be more happy than can be experienced here.

And I know why this is true. You are the part of me not locked up in a little box. You are the one whose breath takes in the eternal, the infinite, the marvelousness of being.

And not anything else. So it doesn’t matter, does it, about all those flitting pictures picturing that “anything else.” No, it matters not at all.

My new swirly design is lovely. I like where it took me and I like how it worked along with me. We were doing it together, I could feel it, I could see it unfold.

(Was that you drawing with me?)

The word I’ve been thinking of for you lately is Presence. I’m not the only one that uses that word for you. But today, for the first time, I asked you about you, in order to better define you for myself because a name for you separates us. I know you little realize how much of you I have forgotten since you feel I am still there with you. Oh, how much of you has become blurred and blurry having been superimposed with so much of that “anything else” world.

We are thinkers you and I. What I need, is to understand how you think. Do you know what I mean? I do a lot of thinking, and all around me I am aware of more than my own thinking and it’s all only a big cloud of confusion that engulfs and weighs me down. I can’t hear what is real, I don’t remember what is true. I’m just not home in gentle peace and quiet joy. Peace. You know, your peace. I hear too much noise. Coming from me. And them. I just want to be home. In myself. A place I strangely call a Presence when you are only what I am, after all.

You alone, dear one, are your life’s significance and pleasure. It originates in your ability to feel joy and find charm in the world you visit. Trust this ability to appreciate and do not let yourself be confused with what others find exciting. Look to the things that delight you and let them resoundingly delight you by never checking to see if they pass the test of other opinion.

You know to embark on the day with simplicity. You see and hear and touch and meet: the leaf tenderly pressed in a book, the baby’s first shoes, the dawn. These are the special whispered moments unique to this Earth experience. They touch your true heart for they come to you as gifts of your spirit. In recognizing them for what they are you make the world soft and kind. This is you as a human. Live her. Enjoy her. Be her. No longer look over your shoulder at what others do, or if they approve.

A promise kept is the world you create with the very little garden growing in the corner of your room while the candle’s steady flame illuminates the playful clay figures dancing on a nearby shelf. Your childlike world is poetry for your Soul is a Poem in action and movement and intent.

(Are you coming into view for yourself?) Use your own perception, not the words from others to bring reality to you. You want more than words. You want what needs no words. You want your peaceful, simple feeling self that appears to have no other purpose but to join you in soulful attendance to what is of you … invisible.

Oh, how fine is your Soul. How refined in its perception of the ineffable and makes you one with it. You have a secret self that makes you in love with being alive. A self that helps you build from eternal strands a human life that breathes wonder in the shadowy corners made of “humble” treasures. You will know yourself when you see that which is the softest thing any living thing ever is.

Be in the world only from your own light. For this you came.

The cloud bends low. Its outer edges form a whisper on the earth grazing the blades of grass that seem to be reaching up to it. Human that I am while watching this fragile moment in time, has me witnessing something that deeply stirs my soul and brings my heart to courage.

I close my eyes. I open them again. I want to believe what I have just seen. I want to believe that the cloud and the grass know one another, and knowing, care. This hope heals my loneliness, warms my cold isolation.

I knew about life before I came. I’ve been feeling quite alone and apart in a brilliantly colored prison, doomed to a world view that is meaningless—I’ve read the books and heard the sermons. They merely trapped in my soul and my imagination.

I sit on the side of the hill, a few little steps from an encounter that removes me from the ordinary of an illusion I will never believe in. I come from where my innocence is assured, my presence met with tenderness. The nature of my nature will never change. There is power even here that will never waver. Life has a loving solid heart. I know I have one too. I breathe and I recover my courage. I find my Grace in oneness.

A tear forms in my eye and I let it fall to cool the flush in my cheek. Soundlessly, the cloud, with a gesture that is not a gesture, dries my tear and brings me the Empty Calm I’ve been missing. I need no longer think, for the wonder of it all. Yet I can hear what does not need to be said. I had only forgotten.

Happily, my magic Pen has not. It always knows what to tell me about reality to share in a magic website designed to speak of these simple things.

I opened the door and the room filled with light. I stood in its warmth and sighed. Relief flooded my being and I became still.

It was a stillness that had never gone away though I had believed it had. Nothing of myself can leave me. Now I know what is thought and felt in this world. There are strange occurrences that bring grief and emptiness, all built from lies. I can only be imagining such a strange reality. I need not let this continue to concern me. I need not despair of it all happening to me as I thought it had happened.

It hadn’t.

It was now morning. And what stood before me was the empty page waiting to be filled from the depth of my stillness. Yes, the one Stillness that dreams yet soars to heights of freedom for remaining what it is. And it lives only within mornings that bring fresh, open pages to show the eternal Originality. Life is a constant morning. A constant Renewal renewing itself. A constant letting go. A constant finding.

Coming and going is what takes place. And within all that twirl of life is the constancy of the Constant Presence that delights in its constant twirling of self. This is the nature I am given. I have no other. Life and I live like this, as one, needing no explanation to confirm aliveness.

I am awake within the Dawn that empowers me.