Sending out Love

It is October! Time to light a candle to the great light of LOVE!

As a moment in light, to send love to an old friend, I lit a candle and planted bulbs for spring flowers.

Writing this newsletter will always reflect waves and shifts, changes and alternating currents. Once again I apologise for not getting all this over to you sooner. As I form and reformat the ongoing identity of this newsletter, I get stuck thinking of different directions. Here’s my take on what’s been going on so far:

The past is gone, the person who started this Personal Papers newsletter over five years ago is no more. It’s only me now, writing as I am in the here and now. And that may not seem to be a change for some of you, but this is the difference: I accept that the past is truly gone.

As I ask, “Now what?” you ask, “where has this newsletter been the past few months?” My inadvertent summer vacation involved being sick from mid-August till early September. After that I burned the rushes and all the mattress-straw, opened the doors and windows, to start again - fresh, suddenly, only to see it is autumn.

And before then? I was waiting for everything to get back to normal. This was a common mistake. Normal has shifted like a moving continent in a fairy tale. I can always get back home, when I know that home is here. But where is here? Sometimes it feels like “a theatre near you”, (if you live really far away.)

I’m late getting the memo, but waiting until everything settles down is no longer an option. Life is a moving stream of transformative becoming. Weeks flow by in their current of events, storm surges, full moons, and suddenly it is cold at night, and night comes sooner than ever each day.

Now is here

That’s something they try to tell you in the meditation schools. But when we think it’s all about enlightenment and realization, the words of the day, the give and take of existence, the philosophical life, meaning may be missed because of the words and our own fixed ideas. Beyond the words something may emerge, appear or shine with a glimmer beyond thought. Now you see it, now you don’t.

Like an implied flashing dot of light in the centre of a triangle. The triangle, with its points of thought, holds in its centre an ineffable something (or nothing) that may (if my mind relaxes its tight grip) just possibly emerge. That’s what I’m talking about.

My life feels so very different from anything that I used to think those books said. Yet funny enough, when I go back to those books, those holy books, now they are telling me about this, exactly, as if it were in real time. But then I remember that this missed boat probably has something to do with how I put everything into the prearranged slots of my mind.

Love’s sudden immediacy
condenses
all that is and was and will be  
into the invisible 
Now

Look at Thoth, (or is it Hermes?)

Those scribes were not writing Substack newsletters. They were communicating the words that were hidden, in the old language of long ago, before there was a tongue to speak. Secreted in the letters, pointers coded contact beyond the disappearing changeable world in its flow of becoming.

This brings me to Clive Palmer. A founder of the Incredible String Band, he moved on after their first album hit the charts, taking off for points east. I’m retrieving something listening to his C.O.B. albums. A music that sounds a bit eternal, pure and of its time and yet of today. too. At least to me. Try this one: Music of Ages

Consensus of the Now

And some of why I was hung up, as they used to say, on trying to find a way back to this newsletter again had to do with the disparate parts of everything, scattered here and there, and seen reflected in the mirror of all the readers, each with their own point of view. A tower of Babel.

Without consensus in this world of bits and bytes — the unbelievable divisive and separative cultural situation we find ourselves in —I felt inadequate, unable to accurately read the room. Self-editing - it’s not a good look. Something made me pause, look for a way to send out something that could, perhaps, be received by all of us.

So I fell silent and waited for inspiration, as usual. Well, nothing came. A drifty situation until I pick up the clues — the inspiration comes in the writing, not in the waiting! That’s when the portal to what is next or new opens. As the wise repeatedly tell us, it was always here. It is the consensus of the Now.

What about the Sands of Time?

I was retrieving some writing for the sequel to my novel, Attars, just as I was recovering from being sick. Going back to update the Attars website, I looked again at photos from the book launch. It wasn’t that long ago, right? Oops, correct that, we have changed a lot since 2017.

The photos of that pivotal event made it very clear - some of the friends who were there have since passed away, others have moved, faced serious health issues, have drifted away, and one way or the other have changed significantly since that afternoon. Not because of that afternoon, but because of the nature of life itself. Take a look at any photo of any larger group of people and see a single pinpoint in time, never to return.

Lama Kaldan said, “Everything changes. Say hello to everybody.”

There’s a gentle way to look back that isn’t either a pillar of salt situation, or one in which Euridice is forever lost to Hades. Something to do with love.

The Diamond Sutra says:

"So you should view this fleeting world --
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."

Or in Red Pine’s translation:

"As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space / an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble / a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning / view all created things like this."

Life as it is. Nothing is static. Nothing stays.

---

James K-M took this photo at the surreal show on Salt Spring Island last week. That’s me and a local apple at the Magritte selfie station.

I hope you take some pleasure in reading my newsletter when it comes in to you. I’ll try not to be such a hermit. Once again, thank you all for your support!

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