"Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition. This metaphor of friendship can be grounded in the clay nature of the human body. When you find a person you love, an act of recognition brings you together. It is as if a million years of silence of nature broke, your lover's clay and your clay lay side by side. Then in the turning of the seasons, your one clay lay divided and separated. 

I don't know why life works out as it does. I have tremendous Faith and I think that helps but how we navigate the ups and downs is a purely personal journey. I think I've had a mid-life crisis; I think I'm coming out of it; everything looks very different.

Huffy's Post is a happy place, it's light, laughter and a smidge of madness.

It wasn't always as such. Happiness is such a funny 'thing' - a curious dichotomy between work, faith and a touch of hope.

Just this morning, having done a menial task of taking out rubbish, I found myself smiling; it felt just like a little wink to the faith, hope and hard work in between.

We make life complicated, but it's simple. It's not easy, but it's simple: be kind.

Be kind to yourself. To the parts of yourself you don't like, first. It's easy to be kind to ourselves about the parts of ourselves we're overly proud of. But lean into what you dislike about yourself, and be honest, and be kind, and be kind.

Do you want to be, want to see everything you can be too?

When you find out, show me how.

Everyday Moni, at the end of the day, sits gazing into the distance. I've asked her what she's thinking about - refuses to tell me - but I find it fascinating. I look up from my desk and there she is, in varying places, but always just quietly and contently with her own thoughts.

She seems so peaceful; like she's just thanking the Universe for her love and luck. That nothing is more important to her than being on her own, with her thoughts and in the moment.

I admire that resolution. I admire the quietness that she emanates. 

She's a cat. I should get out more, right!

... 'it's by willing to experience it without resistance' (@Elizabeth Gilbert) and its true. 

In a fit of self-indulgent sadness I called this beautiful space "a glass tomb where love came to die" (yup roll eyes now!) At worst this is laughable because it's the opposite of what this place is - it's built on love (and actual rose quartz).

The only and the truest name for this place is Huffy's Post.

Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversation way even after one half of the bond had passed.

FRIENDSHIP is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

...A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in silent, a companion in our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships are based on a continual, mutual forgiveness, Without forgiveness and mercy, all friendships die.

Original post here: https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/29/david-whyte-consolations-words/

The longer I live the harder it is to discern between the stronger emotions. They all spill into each other where they begin. The longer I go, though, the more I can tell between not feeling and feeling. For this is all that seems to matter.

Not feeling puts me on the sideline, makes the world black and white, and me, a dry shade of grey. Only feeling keeps me in the scene.

This evening I met a woman who I knew from far but far from knew - our conversation started in a shy staccato way and as we moulded into the sofa her stories unfolded. It never fails to humble me the boldness and fear that we all experience and live right along side each other in our living beating experiences of life - she mesmerised me with all of that. I left feeling sad, for very different reasons.

I've worked so long and hard to be able to feel my way into the lives of others, only to realise that we are all this way. Sometimes the skin of mind is torn and we are no longer separate human beings. When the talking is done we become still proofs of life. I'm leaving this story feeling more than one heart should and I can't tell if I'm in trouble or on holy ground.

In our journey through time, we all struggle constantly with what to bring along and what to leave behind. It feels so hard to let go but if we don't we will drown underneath a weight of our own one-word wonder makings.

A river is a good model - it doesn't own the water that rushes by, yet it couldn't be in a more intimate relationship to it, as the force of what moves through shapes it. It is the same with everything we love. In truth, there is no point in holding on to the deepest things that matter for they have already shaped us. Perhaps the most useful gift we can give ourselves is to lay our lives open like a river.

We are taught to make plans and keep them, we work our way through predesigned courses of study into degrees and mastery, however, our attempts at real life and living don’t happen that way.

For me, finding where I fit in the world feels a lot like spiritual fishing. The mysterious ocean of experience keeps calling - buckets of questions and nets of honesty - I keep pulling up food for the days and then spending time cleaning and understanding what it has to say.

Every person I have ever loved and every path I have ever been called to has shown itself to me after fishing in the water of my spirit. We are all connected there and, by bringing up and taking in what lives within us can we hope to uncover our common purpose of being.

However, even though I believe in living in the open parts of me I want to hide. I seemingly can’t help it but what I can help is which parts of me - the open or hidden - run my life. What I can rely on in this inexplicable knowing that when I am in the open - seen by the darkest heart or the brightest light - life nourishes even those parts so sorely hidden.

We become so preoccupied with what we are not able to address, what we are not able to mend, what we are not able to leave behind that we forget that whatever we are, in the light of day is slowly but surely, healing the rest of us.

Belonging is a choice - to ourselves and each other.

Consider how the sun constantly lights our daily world, yet we cannot see the light except in what it touches. Though the sun constantly burns and holds everything living within it’s pull, though it sends its power across millions of miles, it is unseen for all that way, until it hits a blade of grass or makes the spiders web a patch of golden lace.

Similarly, the presence of God powerfully moves among us, unseen, only visible in brief moments we are enlightened, moments we know as love.

Just as we can look at a spider's web and never see its beauty until it reveals itself in the sudden light, we can look at a face - again and again - never seeing the beauty and depth in each other until one, or both of us is suddenly revealed. Spirits show themselves in just this way, or rather a gentleness of little secrets and slightly dark hearts allow us to see and be seen.

It makes our search for love a humble one. For what is there to do but grow in the open and wait.

I was talking to a tree the other day and it said to me "Universe when I come back I don't want to just be wood." So I thought out loud 'What's wrong with being wood?" 

"It's hard," the tree said, without cracking a smile. "I want to come back soft and furry so that I can be loved by children.

So I thought and thought and thought and finally asked 'Why not be tall and strong, just as you are, and be loved by children?" and the children came to play.

It begs the question, time and again, do you really think you have to change, to have what you want?

When we count with our eyes we stall the heart -  for the eyes can see clearly what is broken without ever feeling the break, and the mind can calculate the loss without ever sewing up the wound. Without touching the life coming apart before us, we can race to rebuild before the wrecked dream ever hits the ground. While this makes us resilient and efficient as ants, it also keeps us from living in what we build.

What makes us precise and efficient can also begin a life of neurosis, not touching what we see, not feeling what we know. This is how the mind skips the heart's step. How we forget that blood on the news is real and that the cry from the street is attached to something living. Such a profound and simple lesson: to count with our hands brings us deeper than all counting, numbers give way to notes and sums give way to song.

But one the hardest blessings to accept about the heart is that in the image of life itself, it will not stop emerging through experience. No matter how we try to preserve or relive what has already happened, the heart will not stop being shaped. The curiousness of life brings me, time and again, to this realisation that - despite my resistance to accept what we've lost is behind us, despite our need at times to stitch wounds closed by reliving them, and despite my heroic efforts to preserve what is precious, despite all my attempts (at times) to stop the flow of life, my heart knows better. I know - at my core - the only way to truly remember or stay whole is to take the best and worst into its tissue.

The heart keeps us going by moving us ever forward, though I walk around thinking I can direct my heart, our hearts are endlessly shaped, like the land, often against our will.

Everyone personalises and projects, personalising is mistaking what happens in the world as always having to do with you. Projecting is the reverse, it occurs when we place the things that happen in us onto the world around us. Often unknowingly, we attribute our fears and frustrations to others. Rather than accept my own anger I see you as angry.

The truth is that no one can avoid personalising or projecting - there are only those of us who are aware of it and those of us who are not. Those of us who own it when it happens and those of us who don't But this difference is crucial. Not owning things can end relationships. Owning them can deepen them.

Humans have spilt soup for eternity, and generations have made excuses saying "It was the Earth, the Earth shifted" and generations have secretly thought "He meant to do it."

I was the cause of soup spilling earlier this week. As ever my one-word wonder and I were at a crossroads, this one of my making; she projected onto me and I personalised it in return.  I sat with her, after I had spilt the soup, and listened to the emotions in her words and, at the moment, I knew that the difference was crucial to our deepening or ending.

If you want to save the world, when you spill the soup, simply say 'I"m sorry, I spilt the soup."

Living long enough we each find ourselves surrounded by an old way of being, thinking and loving that is going up in flames. In an unexpected moment I read the words, of my one-word wonder, that said 'You'd don't share, I'm not sure if you realise or not..'. In that moment I was stuck in fear, feeling trapped by an old way of life coming in on me.

It's understandable to stall at the wall of flame, not wanting to face all that is burning around us; yet old ways can burn forever and waiting for the flames to go out seldom works, we can waste years in waiting. Like a frightened man in a burning boat, in that moment, I chose to trust her, to believe that the greater sea I was about to jump into would douse whatever caught fire as I moved through it - this is what faith is all about.

Without trying to be brave and with great fear I have stumbled and jumped through many walls of flame. The first time, I think, was in leaving home - needing to go, burning at the edge, afraid I wouldn't survive beyond the flame of anger in which I was raised. Buoyed by youth the wall of flame seemed to burn brightly and in my favour but all too soon I had to move through the flames of utter despair in death and lost love.

Here the broken part of me was almost willing to be burned alive. I felt certain there was nowhere to go and nothing that could soothe me. I more fell through this wall than jumped, it seemed the entire sea was on fire. Even, once overboard, drifting farther and farther from the flames I thought I might drown. How could I know that the greater sea was the womb of a deeper life. But and, of course, once in the sea of life beyond myself, the world continued and I healed.

But the subtlest ring of fire, it seems, is that self-centered way of thinking that starts to suffocate us with smoke. For we carry the smouldering self-centered everywhere we go. It lives off us and eats up who we are. Being a commitment fence-sitter was hard to hear and I struggled with the reality of the words she gave me but she has shown trust in me with such boldness I realised it was about time to look her in the eye and love her, in that way, in return. 

So how to jump from the burning boat of me? I think it's about jumping from the boat of ego into the sea of spirit. Finally, perhaps, I feel I can find the courage to surrender my stubbornness and dreams of control, let the edge of my ego burn and jump through. I will do more than survive I will be carried to an unimagined shore.

I've lived a transitory life. It has its moments - I've seen and been things, I've grown up and into those places but it has its jaded edges and one of those is that you don't necessarily lean into the experience and fully embrace it.

We moved house - again - and because it's the nature of my beast I kept moving; things don't and can't gather under my feet - perhaps another conversation with my one-word wonder.

It's a wonderous thing arriving at a point and it's not really the point at all - it's just another brick in the wall. It's a beautiful brick but just a brick. 

On we go.