On devotion & yearning

I am sitting here writing to you from the forest of Lake Tahoe, listening to Daniel Imhof’s ambient excursions playlist on Soundcloud (you can thank him for most of these letters), drinking a ‘cup of joe’ in honour of David Lynch, (which any trip to the US is always a DL honorary), and the snow is falling all around me through the windows of our old 80s motorhome ‘Gloria’ - aka the closest I get to heaven to earth - snow.

I have been quiet here, I apologize, life has been life-ing, and I’ve been pouring all of myself into THIS HOLY LIFE cohort, and wow do I love this work so so so much.

Devotion is everything.

May we all be so steeped in it that everything we do becomes an offering to the highest, becomes ritualised living. May we be dripping in the nectar of the sacred dimensions of reality, especially in the most mundane…

Today’s session marked the halfway point through our journey, moving through the gateway and threshold of Eros, understanding this force in its widest sense as our fundamental life-force but also as the bridge between us and divinity, between us and the web of life. As you can feel so keenly from the mystic poets, their recognition of divinity awoke a sense of intimacy with reality, so much so that they speak of “It” - reality, mystery, god - as their Beloved. And in their praise of the Beloved they expressed their holy yearning.

Even zen master Dogen is often quoted to have said that 'enlightenment is intimacy with the 10 000 things'.

The longing for life to birth itself out of nothing into something, into everything, is eros. Of course the Tantrikas depicted reality in the image of Shiva and Shakti - Being / Becoming - in divine consummation, giving us the clue that source is in a lovership with itself. That it is not neutral or sterile or detached, but that it is bursting with eros and yearning.

Something I wrestle with these days is how do we attune to eros in a time of collapse, in the time of apocalypse (of the great ‘unveiling’), in the time of the Long Dark (as grief tender Francis Weller puts it), in a time of genocide and ecocide…

And I would say, by learning to hold our grief close, by keeping the material warm so that it can move and transform and compost itself, so that we don’t harden, numb, congeal, but we keep our channel open to receive life. And receiving life is eros. Allowing the world to reveal itself to us is eros.

The monotheistic patriarchal religious power structures have sought to oppress and suppress the wild liberated force of eros, precisely because it is the bridge into a direct unmeditated relationship with divinity, and so in these times of collapse as we welcome the downfall of harmful systems, we must attune to our senses and remember that we are still courting a lovership with the breathing, living, dreaming earth, the web of life.

And it is this love and awe and tenderness and yearning for life that must drive our revolution and our spiritual inquiry,

I believe.

With love,

xR