Rob and I visited The Braves stadium yesterday. Since they were not playing and it was around two o’clock, there were few visitors. We split a pizza at Antico Pizza. I had a latte with it and then we got gelato that was fabulous. We wandered into River Street Sweets and brought home pralines and some candy for my next-door neighbor, who is in the hospital.

Routine chores have had me busy this week. We are getting the lawn aerated and overseeded in a couple of days. Need to buy a new hose, nozzle and sprinkler.
The political scene is a dangerous one and I am trying not to become “discombobulated” about it.

Breathing in, I know I’m breathing in. Breathing out, I know I’m breathing out. (Plus eating candy and drinking coffee.
Rob’s birthday is Saturday. Will post photo then.

Love,
Vicki

The griefs that I have experienced have been like Hurricane Ian. After the death of our daughter, the landscape for our family changed permanently. She was still three when the fatal diagnosis came to us; she turned four with the noose around her neck. And the hopes and dreams of our family were demolished.

Lest this sound overly dramatic, no one loses a small child without deep and prolonged grief and a legacy of trauma. St. Jude’s is the place where no parent wants to be told to go. Yet after she was diagnosed, that is where we ended up.

When her father was also diagnosed with a fatal cancer, the trauma came to life again. If you are tired of hearing me write about this, I still feel the need to get it down in words on occasion.

We began as a family of four, then three and now the two of us that are left. Ours is a quiet life punctuated with small pleasures. Nothing big or stressful for me; I am happy with the day-to-day.

I have always been interested in spirituality and have studied and practiced deeply. The essays arise spontaneously and I seldom change anything about them. They are the scars turned into stars, as the saying tritely goes.

I favor simplicity and speed when I write. An essay seldom takes over five minutes to write; that is a sign that they are part of me. I dislike dry dissertations of awakening, as my interest in the subject is not technical.

Life is huge but the living of it is small, like these essays. If one bites off more than he or she can chew, something is lost. So I keep it simple, always simple.

Hurricane Ian has changed thousands of lives in an instant, yet the recovery process will be excruciatingly slow.

Love is in charge of it all. Somehow the big things arise in the smallest things. A little child lost to cancer, an entire home demolished in Ian—life must and should go on. But the losses will have to be experienced and that is where love comes in.

Unwittingly we place God outside of ourselves when all arises from within. As a result of my family’s losses, I am obsessive about studying life. Sometimes it feels like grief is a glacial process that one can only take so much of. I turn to TV and crossword puzzles when my mind needs a rest. The heart, though, never sleeps. It has its own memory and schedule and we would be advised to honor its way of healing us.

“This above all, to thine own self be true,” is the mantra of the heart. I bow low before it lest I dishonor love.

Vicki Woodyard

We are all playing the head game of the heart. Might as well acknowledge that we are just going around in circles. A good teacher is full of insults for you because they have given up and don’t give a rap about you and your “precious darling feelings” as Vernon Howard put it.

Feelings are egocentric in the end. They contribute to the delay in getting back home.

What is needed is relentless redirection and because we are asleep, we forget the needful.

Someone has to play the role of teacher, thus finding people playing the role of student. It’s all deeply interesting, that’s for sure.

I have been writing for so long that my mind is always ahead of my fingers. I rush at the keyboard like I have something to say. But let’s face it, the mind is a dodo.

Mind cannot teach another mind about awakening.

So what can be done? You know the answer to that.

The game will continue to be played; might as well try and enjoy it. The caveat here is that the ego enjoys nothing for very long. It is cantankerous, stubborn and empty of meaning.

Shall I bang on?

Vicki Woodyard

I, as a fallible human being, can never attain enlightenment. This sentence should make it abundantly clear about the ability of human beings to pretend to something they can never be.

Oh, they can write reams of interesting material on the subject. I believe these are called “pointers.” This word has fallen into disuse by the non-dual community. Yes, dear readers, we can only be fingers pointing, but there is no anointing.

If you can explain it, you can’t attain it!

Zen Buddhism is good at finger-pointing, perhaps the best.

But listen to the words of Jesus: “I of mine own self can do nothing.”

So Vicki sits at her keyboard pointing until the letters fade out on it. She still doesn’t get it.

Her life is a mixture of sleep and awakening. The disciples had a similar problem. We are born into this world as human beings and we are seldom able to rise above our humanhood.

Joel Goldsmith wrote a lot about making contact with God; he urged people to sit in silence until they felt some kind of true peace come over them. But he said we have to keep doing this because we fall sleep all day long.

There are no real guarantees about anything on the spiritual level, but we must keep trying to honor the inner Self.

Few truly want to awaken and even fewer want to confess their inability to stay awake long enough to achieve anything remotely resembling enlightenment.

Words are not the thing. The thing is the thing.

Vicki Woodyard

I have the right and the duty to rise above the opposites. This is the bottom line of all true spirituality.

This is an energy teaching.

Energy does not take sides or commit violence.

Energy is indestructible.

When we lower it, we have hell to pay.

So we should start our day with our duty to rise above thinking in opposites. This is the trap in which we are ensnared.

The trap can be related to love or hate; both are traps. Above love and hate, true compassion arises.

Politics is energy gone haywire; there is nothing good about it It is a power game pure and simple.

I cannot live these truths as yet, but they become clearer and clearer to me that all of existence, as Einstein discovered, is energy.

Vicki Woodyard

Nothing can destroy the divine consciousness that we are. The worldly evil has always been with us, but it cannot kill the Self that we all are.

I have to catch myself from believing that evil has any power. It doesn’t. It has seeming power but no real power.

Evil stalks Ukraine; it stalks America; it stalks innocence, but it has no power over love.

The Self is pure love.

We must remember that empires always topple.

Evil never scores a permanent victory.

Sit up straighter; stand up taller. Dismiss all evil as temporary. Only higher consciousness can win.

Life is a stage upon which evil is enacted. The players can be replaced, but life cannot.

Suffering has no hold over the Self.

The Self, just like “The Dude” abides.

(The dude is in the moment. He is in the now. That is why he doesn’t care about status, wealth, attachment, love, or even his own name. (That’s why he speaks in third person) Harmony is listening to music, bowling, enjoying being alive, breathing. His state of “One-ness” has more fulfillment than anything he can achieve, that is enlightenment. He only has hardships due to other peoples actions and interference, and even so it’s only temporary til he returns to his “State of Dude”, taking it easy like you know he will. “Yeah, well..The Dude Abides.”) ~A readers’s comment on “The Big Lebowski.”

Vicki Woodyard

As I sat down to meditate this morning, one word leapt out at me: Grace! And that is because grace does not involve words or prayers; it simply exists.

There is a reason why grace is called “amazing.” It is freely given to all who ask for it; it lies within each individual.

Ask to tune into grace and see what happens next.

Yes, you’re right. Nothing happens and that nothing is everything, simply because complicating grace is ridiculous. Just “ask and it shall be given.”

I am under grace as I type these words to you who are reading them.

I know that I don’t know how to accept the grace that comes to me.

The confession that I don’t know IS the thing that works.

Grace uncomplicates things. It reminds us that everything has already happened.

Time is an illusion; it is a basic measurement of eternity.

The earth spins itself into grace.

We were born by grace and we shall die by grace.

Let go of all concepts about grace and wait for it in the silence.

Acknowledge that you don’t know. It is as simple as that.

Vicki Woodyard

Society is a false overlay over the Self with a capital “S.” Those who read my essays recognize this! Anyone trying to awaken from society’s chokehold on the spirit reads this loud and clear.

Society is governed politically by those who lie to the masses for a living. There is no polite way to put it. The two-party system we live under guarantees lies for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Oh, they spice them up with seemingly tasty promises that never come true. That’s their bag; it’s what they do.

The “Us’s and the “Them’s” argue endlessly over how to bilk the public. Nothing ever is simple with politicians and yet they themselves are (insert giggle.)

We are in danger of getting taken over by a party with no scruples. But I digress…. I was talking about this false overlay that we call ego. Remember when your mother scolded you for trying to keep a toy for yourself? I do. All it did was teach you to act nice on the outside while feeling not-so-nice on the inside.

Since I am an introvert, I have never enjoyed socializing with people falsely. And that’s what socializing is. It’s never letting them see you sweat. It’s having to be nice to those who are not nice inside. It’s a myriad of things that tamp down the spirit. And the spirit is who we truly are.

When I would visit Vernon Howard’s school, the veneer couldn’t stay in place. That was because the students were in overload at all times; they had no time for niceties.

He loved it when our facades cracked; the sooner the better as far as he was concerned. Now we could face our endless sorrow over having nothing real about ourselves except the pain of play-acting!

So what is Vicki doing these days? She is banging out essays like this one. She spends her days, not socially, but in solitude.

Solitude is breathing room for human beings broken and tamed by a superficial society.

Yee haw!

Vicki Woodyard

I haven’t posted in a few days, but nothing much has happened. When I go to bed, I never feel sleepy. Thus I lie awake for hours and wake up a bit loopy. Oh, well. Even though time is an illusion, one pays the price for disrespecting it.

Yesterday was quite pleasant. Rob drove me to Macy’s to return a few things. Macy’s is no longer the store it used to be pre-pandemic. There are few salespeople and the store itself is showing definite signs of neglect. I believe there are people like me who seldom shop in a store anymore. There was a new sign out front that pointed people to the Pick Up and Returns departments.

We had a burger and fries at a neighbor restaurant. We got there before the afterwork crowd and enjoyed our meal. Then he got ready to go to a concert and I watched TV until bedtime.

Puerto Rico has been almost destroyed once again. Climate change is now coming fast and furiously towards the continent.

Trump is in defiance of democracy and I have doubts as to whether it will hold. His “believers” are now more frenzied than ever. All for a businessman who has never respected anyone or anything. Not only is he a businessman, he is a failed one.

Working on myself is a daily experiment as well. Mainly I watch Vicki as she goes about her day. She is eating too much sugar and watching too much TV.

I know her so well. Traumatized by years of caregiving, she is careful to the point of obsession. She had rather stay home than go out. She refuses to use her cell phone and her vital papers are, well….not as organized as they once were.

Her heart, once so repeatedly crushed, is now calmer and more peaceful. She dwells on the simple words of Jesus. She follows although she backslides often. But peace surrounds her.

Peace is not valued anymore. The old world wobbles on its axis and its inhabitants are clutching their chests in fear. What next, they wonder. What next?

“My kingdom is not of this world.” Definitely true. Once we look within, we find a bit of comfort. We never find it anywhere else.

Vicki Woodyard

I feel restless today. All of the political stuff being thrown against the wall to see what will stick. Sadly, Trump’s lies are still sticking like spaghetti.

Climate change is on the menu more and more as we watch floods and fires cause more and more suffering.

I turn to the words of The Master: “My kingdom is not of this world.” Then where is it? It is within the man or woman who is tired of role-playing.

If you are trying to wake up, witnessing is Job One. Not complaining but witnessing. Not lying but witnessing.

Find something within you that refuses to lie to you, for the world is a lie.

Never trust anything but your own knowing.

Rely only on what separates you from this lost world.

It is a fair question to ask: What does separate me from this world of pain?

Silence.

Stay quiet and unconcerned.

Be still and know.

Vicki Woodyard