The Inside Moves

It's hot tonight.  Hotter overnight temperatures than most of my Northern Hemispherean friends will see at the height of their day that is beginning as mine is ending.  My old but working air conditioner chugs coldness out into my darkened lounge room.  It is a sheet and no doona night.

We move toward the solstice in less than a week.

I am greedy for the light.  So greedy that the approach of the solstice fills me with sadness because it is downhill from here.  If that's not the voice of a seasonally affectively disordered person, I don't know what is.  The desperate grab of addiction, there never being enough light.  Bemoaning the downward dip.  As if the light is suddenly going to start dipping out of the sky at 5pm by next Friday :)

I love the way things go.  The way the seasons blend.  The grace that is held within the steady downward sweep of light into dark and then back into light again.  I keep looking around at older women.  I am fascinated by older women.  We see the downward sweep from light collagen to dark death but we do not often think that there is light collagen out the other side of the door.  Our culture has taught that it is life/death but that is simply not true.  Everything around us has life after its death.  And yet that is not something that can be proven scientifically, or rationally.  But right down to the very cells within me, which have all renewed themselves several times over before my own physical death happens, I feel that this is true even with us, even with everything.

My friend Jane and I sat on the weekend talking about how gravity and ageing brings you up against issues that in your twenties you thought you would never contemplate.  Boob jobs and botoxing and dying grey hairs.  And yet we are both resolute that we shall age as gracefully as we can.

And anyway, we talked about true beauty being that which shines from within.  That is so cliched as to sound really poxily wanky.  The reality of that inner beauty is something much more mercurial, delicious.  But it probably wouldn't even be called beauty even though it seems to be the absolute essence of what beauty is.  The outward facade of attractive and beautiful people is a smaller version of it but we have made it everything.  So it doesn't seem all that strange to me therefore that in our society even young, beautiful girls are looking more and more overdone.  (Or perhaps I am just getting old :)  But there is so often a harshness about beautiful girls and women whose beauty would be so much more awesome if it wasn't ramped and trashed up. 

The beauty that comes from within bubbles.  I saw my friend Ed in the health food shop on Monday.  I have known Ed for quite a few years now and he has helped me immensely find my way back to some semblance of good health after having CFS for so long.  We have the most wonderful conversations.  We talk spiritual matters.  He tells me where he's been at and what he's seeing.  Like the free Living Now magazine that graces the stand underneath his counter, some of Ed's ideas have veered toward the more fruit loopy of New Age ideas.  And yet, even within that, we always - always - find room to be able to swim in the Isness of Truth together, despite how differently we are seeing.

It's some sort of grace.


I had had a pretty strange last several days, all told.  They saw me up all night on Friday night with an infection and then saw me in a delirium of courage on Saturday afternoon, after two hours' sleep, scaling the wall of prayer and meditation into wishing someone well who had bewildered me, out of a situation where I felt so much hurt and confusion and rejection.  Part of that whole scenario is the reason for this blog move.  I do not want him to read my words, as he has so avidly done every single day for the past two years, if he does not want me in his real life.  Enough said about that.

Where was I?  Yes, Ed and Monday afternoon.  When I go and visit Ed in his health food shop it's always a long enterprise.  We have so much to catch up on and share about and the customers coming into the shop needing help for their health issues mean that for long periods of time I walk about the shop trying not to buy anything else.  On Monday I sat on the comfortable cushioned wicker chair and sort of meditated, eyes open.  I was feeling truly blissed out even within the midst of this grief and this health issue that was still stealing my sleep.  I cannot really explain it except to say that that wall I had climbed over on Saturday afternoon of "may the best outcome win" and letting everything go just sent me off into this bliss where I just felt like what I didn't have I didn't need it now, and that my life held as much promise and prospect and wonder in its future as I could open my arms to.  It has been the most wonderful sort of a comfort.

Ed has moved on now to A Course in Miracles and was enjoying, inbetween customers, telling me about the Holy Spirit and Jesus and how it's all about forgiveness.  It was funny hearing Ed talk about Jesus but it was good (it was an advance on last time we talked where Jesus was a load of hokum invented by someone in the fifteenth century.  I have no need whatsoever to convince Ed about anything.  I have no hesitation in saying what I believe.  It is a rich field, and beautiful).  We talked about forgiveness and how you fall into it and how it's everything and at the end of our talking we both had tears in our eyes, and it is true.  It's all about being as empty-handed as you can, of loving each other.  It's very, very simple indeed.

"Look at you, you are just glowing!" Ed sad in wonderment to me, which was hilarious because I felt fucking awful.  But that is grace too.

Because beauty is really not about how you look.  Not ultimately.  We have all had the experience of seeing a person who is not particularly good looking but who manages to have all eyes in the room upon them.  There is a grace about them a confidence.  It is some sort of inner beauty.

And right now, I feel beautiful.  When I live in this space, I am 25 years old.  It will never, ever fade.