Earth’s crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God; but only (s)he who sees takes off his(her) shoes, the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Take your shoes off in the presence of God. Where you stand is holy ground. Those two sentences were on my mind and coming out of my face as I made my way to my office two afternoons ago. Take your shoes off in the presence of God. Where you stand is holy ground. Whaaaaaaaat?! Profound words right? They’re even more profound when you know what they actually mean. Imma break it down in a minute. Let’s just rest a sec while I tell you a story.
I’m not hesitating in the slightest when I say that much of last week was a hot trifle mess. A HOT mess. By the end of the week I felt downright terrorized by every thing happening around me. I wasn’t sad. I was pissed. I was confused. I was befuddled and mixed up and generally not the best person to hang around if you happen to grace this planet with thin skin. I had a bone to pick with errrrrybody, but nobody in particular–which made my mood even worse. Ever get there? Ever feel like folk is wrong on so many fronts– to even get started with it makes you want to spit because it’s impossible to finish that list once you start. Twitter rants don’t justify a dang on thing and suddenly you realize that whatever you’ve been working toward is actually further than you thought and you have no idea how you even came to think that. Shit.
That’s where I was last week. From a literal place of euphoria only seemingly seconds before, I felt like I had plummeted into the pits of human being hell–angry for no reason, suffocating by my complaints and no idea how I found myself there. I was off path. I was the queen of judgement. I felt horribly and everything in my life went from being “easy, breezy, beautiful Cover Girl!” to how the fffff did this fly get in my granola?! I’ll agree here with my friend Zakia, who at the Phillies game (tailgate party) the other night called me “cerebral”. This is true. I am perpetually in my own head and find comfort there. I also understand completely that the circumstances we find ourselves in are both a product and byproduct of the thoughts we keep. Obviously, I had allowed my brain vessel to fill up with junk. It was obvious because I was standing square in front of a pile of junk. It wasn’t even junk I actually cared about. The pile of steaming gar-bage was a lot of other people’s problems I happened to collect over the course of a week or two. It was more than other people’s problems. It was my opinions of the problems. It was scathing reactions to the problems and the people who actually created those problems. It was a ginormous pile of complaints and rants and criticism and ripping folk’s characters to the shreds they started out with. It was my ego thinking itself so grand that I found myself looking down on said character shreds with that aghast,”how dare they?!” look on my face. My head was a jumble of stuff I didn’t actually own, but had simply acquired for sake of paying attention AND giving energy to them.
I have some battle scars from my efforts. But that’s not even the point of this post.
The entire notion of how off square I felt was so disconcerting, I found myself retracing my steps. It was a bit like a scavenger hunt. What things did I do or say that could have caused me to make that right, instead of that left on that corner over there? How in the ffff did I end up in other people’s hell, when my toes were just caressing the greenest grasses of star people heaven? I didn’t have to walk far to figure out how my journey had gotten so off path and so quickly. I only had to pay attention to the stream of steaming yuck that was happening through my head at the moment I shut up enough to listen. I was in the mirror actually. I hate to sound cliche, but it’s the truth. I have an awful ritual of face picking that happens every single time my face and a mirror find acquaintance. It’s normally in the morning before work and at night before bed. Either time of day a mirror and I come to be, I’ll search my face relentlessly for anything that doesn’t belong there. The slightest bulge of sebum under my skin becomes a battleground for my fingers to uproot it. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. My skin heals quickly and I adore peroxide, so I don’t care. I mean, I do. I have some battle scars from my efforts. But that’s not even the point of this post.
So, I’m in the mirror, picking my face and for whatever reason, I start to pay attention to the stream of things going through my head. You know how you can be so intent on doing a thing that requires no thought, that you aren’t paying attention to your thoughts? Well, yeah. That’s what was happening. I was in a zone. But again, for whatever reason my attention shifted. It wasn’t even abruptly. It was like the part of my attention that was focused on my face, moved to what was happening in my head. It was like watching a play. My thoughts were a stage full of actors and my attention was the audience. While I watched, I realized it wasn’t even a compelling play. Whoever wrote that thing could have been a writer for The Real Housewives of Atlanta. The actors were screaming at each other about stuff nobody in their right mind would care about and the the set was a jumble of a million different things: scenes from a million years ago, people I no longer knew or cared about, conversations I’ve had, mistakes I’ve made, people I don’t like and all the reasons I don’t like them. I think the only compelling scene in that awkward play was a fantastical revenge plot that I can’t even remember anymore. The point is, my thoughts were a mess. I was all over the place with all kinds of things happening in my head and none of it had anything to do with what I want for my life or what I’m up to presently.
Want to talk about distraction? Honey. Distraction x 12 contrillion. I was complaining about everything. And my complaints, whether valid or not, real or not, constructive or not had turned into a sea of crap infiltrating the entire life I have worked so hard and for so long to uplevel. Whatever one nasty thought it was that started it, triggered this tsunami effect in my brain that I didn’t pay attention to until the nasty thoughts started to make my life feel nasty too. I can’t explain it better than that. Three years ago, I maybe wouldn’t have noticed for a month or two and would have chalked it up to a bad patch or “here comes life sucking again”, not even thinking it was something in me orchestrating any tangible or intangible disaster my life felt like. The beautiful thing about where I am now, I know how life actually feels. I know what it’s like to look around and see things that most folk wouldn’t describe as extraordinary, but still feel extraordinary, because everything is exactly that. I know what that looks like. I know what that feels like. I know what it’s like to see beauty in the ugliest places and people and it be the truth. So for me to feel awful and off square, with what I know to be true from experience, I couldn’t blame it on PMS and be accurate. I mean, I could. But it wouldn’t be true.
What had happened was I was right and everything not me was wrong. What had happened was a dip back into very, very common consciousness.
Last Monday, I sat down to write a post about my favorite show on TV right now, The Newsroom. I was compelled to write that post because I had read so many scathing critic reviews of the show and I wanted to tell the lot exactly why I thought it was THEY who deserved the scathing response. I dedicated an entire day to the task. The post was near finished, the pictures had been added, etc. My writing process is to write until I stop. Let it marinate for a few hours while I do something else, and then come back to it and read it and make sure it’s up to my standards. The funny thing is, no matter how many times I read that article, it didn’t feel finished. It just felt wrong. Sure, I’m not a TV critic or even a critic critic, so yeah, it wasn’t a normal writing route I’m prone to take. But I’m a writer. I write all kinds of pieces. As long as they feel inspired, I flow with it. The thing is, this piece didn’t feel inspired. It felt like a rant Rush Limbaugh would have except about Barack Obama. It felt like my ego had brodied my spirit. It felt like, because I found myself offended that a show I thought brilliant had been disrespected by folk who either didn’t get it or just didn’t like it for any number of “nobody cares” reasons, I needed to counter attack to defend my choice to love the show. Which actually sounds stupid as I write this out, but that about sums it up.
But it wasn’t just that. It was a myriad of people and circumstances that crossed my path that pissed me off because their “fake” irked me. Oh, I went to town on Twitter about those nameless folk who found their way to my irk list. People who had barely bleeped my radar before, had found prominent irksome placement in my thought stream. Not even realizing it, by opening myself up to the garbage that hadn’t found place in my head for some time and never for more than as much time as it takes to finish a Twitter rant, I had unknowingly opened another kind of Pandora’s box. I had opened a portal of brain complaints that had festered into a week and some change of bad days that wouldn’t go away, no matter how many affirmations I repeated to counteract them. What had happened in my head was a battle of sorts. A battle between who I am and who some of my media peers are. What had happened was gossip. What had happened was I got caught up in the world and lost my connection to what actually is. Even though I had the best intentions in the world. What had happened is I believed because I had opinions about any single thing, I believed that my opinion was superior and everyone else’s was inferior because their opinion wasn’t in line with mine. What had happened was I was right and everything not me was wrong. What had happened was a dip back into very, very common consciousness.
My friend MelRo and I were talking about the above very thing most of last week. We had a particular chat on Monday that is the actual inspiration of this very post. I was telling MelRo that after I “finished” that “Newroom” post, I had zero compulsion to publish it. I worked out instead and then sat in mediation for 20 minutes or so. I remember when I first sat down on my zafu, my brain was racing a trillion miles minute. I was itemizing all the things I wanted to accomplish last week. One of the items on that list was to figure out how to finish my “Newsroom” post. I was five minutes in when I had the presence of mind to tell my brain to shut up. Politely. As I was sitting and my thoughts settled, I started to feel better. When I finally opened my eyes, I said out loud: “I am the light.” I was inspired to find a pen and paper and write these words: “New Blog Post: I Am the Light.” Instinctively, I knew this to be the answer to my “Newsroom” post question. I wasn’t to finish it. I was given another task instead. I thought, damn. Okay. I got this. I left for the evening and pondered what a post with that title would be about. The next day, I came in and started to write it. I have no issue in saying that attempt was a jumbled, hot steaming pile of stupid. It started out one thing and then changed to something else, and then formed to something else and by the time I was frustrated enough by it, I didn’t even care to write for the rest of the week. So I didn’t. Because none of it had anything to do with “I Am the Light”.
You can’t learn the lessons of spirit unless you EXPERIENCE them AND our words our futile unless we put our very LIFE behind them.
Meanwhile, my mood hadn’t changed AT ALL. It was a real pain in the ass to play cop to all the nutty things that had run amuck in my head. I had to be in New York on Saturday to see A Streetcar Named Desire during closing weekend and after that, I had to be in Brooklyn to host my friend Kasheem Daniel’s Battle of the Beats charity fundraiser. On my way to the train to NYC, every single thing you can think to imagine could go wrong, went “wrong”. Nothing happened as I planned it to. It took too long to leave my house. I was stuck behind the longest funeral car caravan on the planet. I missed three trains. I had to pay way more money for my train ticket than I planned. I met up with a guy I know and haven’t seen for a year and he was eyeing another girl while he was talking to me (like his mouth was moving in my direction, but his face was somewhere else. Rude). I mean, talk about little teeny things conspiring for shitty day overload before I even took a breath in Manhattan. My only salvation was the quiet of an Amtrak ride up and a book I had the presence of mind to bring with me. That book? Wishes Fulfilled by Dr. Wayne Dyer.
That’s where I was introduced to that Elizabeth Browning quote that heads this post. It’s worthy enough for repeat:
Earth’s crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God; but only (s)he who sees takes off his(her) shoes, the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
I read that quote at the tail end of Chapter 2, titled, Your Highest Self. The chapter references the part in the bible about Moses meeting that famous burning bush. Also famously, Moses was asked to remove his shoes because the ground where he was standing was holy. We’ve all heard the story a contrillion times. It may have even been explained to you a contrillion times. I don’t know what your take on it is, but I’ll admit, I never understood what it fully meant, until I read this passage by Dr. Dyer. Consequently, this passage is also meant to explain the above Browning quote:
Yes, indeed, the Earth’s crammed with heaven, and you are Earth, filled to overflow with God. So take off your shoes and respect the holy space that is you.
What Dyer is saying is that we are made of the same stuff that created every single solitary thing on this planet. Every. Single. Thing. And beyond. By necessity, we are more than an extension of that holy. We are that holy. Which means, every place we are is holy ground. That’s what I was referring when I opened this piece. Take your shoes off in the presence of God. Where you stand is holy ground.
My week long string of horrible days got much better before I read those words. But reading them, put everything in perspective. I began to understand what was meant when I said out loud “I Am the Light” last Monday. But I wouldn’t have been able to understand what those words meant, if I hadn’t experienced them for myself. I believe that’s what last week was designed to teach me about myself and about how BEing of spirit works. You can’t learn the lessons of spirit unless you EXPERIENCE them AND our words our futile unless we put our very LIFE behind them.
We spend a lot of our time doing and saying and thinking things that do not reflect who we truly are and what we were born to be. We spend a lot of our precious lives engaged in gossip and complaining and arguing and explaining and fighting and defending and talking relentlessly about senseless things and wonder vehemently why so many of our lives suck so very badly. Few of us find ourselves in front of a mirror watching the train wreck of thoughts that stream through our heads. Few of us even know that the very thoughts we keep guide the very lives we lead. I didn’t revisit that place of darkness long because I’m a very different person now than I was before. But I was there long enough to recognize I and I alone choose a life of darkness or light. We can’t have it both ways.
The light is always present. Even when all we choose to see is darkness. The light is us. It’s our perspective on what we see that turns it on. There’s a sort of running joke I have on Instagram because most every picture I take of myself has a light in it. The light is always prominent in the picture and sits with me as though its a person all by itself. My joke about it is “the light follows me”. The truth of the universe is, it does. It follows you too.
Just by being cognizant of what we think, we can and do change the very course of our life experience. It’s that simple and that complicated. “I Am the Light” is a life lesson, more than a mere title of this blog post. It’s a practice. Just like being awesome or eating well, it’s a lifestyle. What we choose to share of ourselves in this reality is always a reflection of who we choose to be. Everything we do, reflects that choice. AND there is always an opportunity, should we seize it, to make a better choice that reflects our highest selves. Rather than a common choice that happens to reflect the common world– that also happens to suck so very badly for so many spirits living in it. The choice is always yours and your alone. I explained it like this to MelRo on Sunday:
Common Consciousness = crawling
Higher Consciousness = walking
Highest Consciousness = running
God Consciousness = flying
We were all born with wings… AND it’s damned uncomfortable to crawl once you’ve learned to walk.
The moral of this story? No idea. Just some food for thought. Thank you for reading this thought. Peace and abundant “live light” blessings. Love, -e-