My heart is a reliable instrument because God is the tuning fork. When my mind empties of thought, He is able to make music through me. I never know what the words will convey. I just allow myself to be used. Tonight seems to be about awakening to what is and forgetting what will never be.

Regret is resolutely put behind me so that I can awaken to my glory. I have planted my Morning Glory seeds and followed the instructions to take the strongest seedling and plant it. So far, so good. There are only about three leaves looking to the light at this point. If it flowers, it won’t have anything to do with thought.

The sun is totally true to its mission. It shines on the just and the unjust. Awareness is the same way. We are aware of how badly we fail when we turn to thoughts about God instead of to God Himself. And He is both within and without.

The music that God makes ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, from gut-bucket blues to the highest harmonies. We are His instruments and listen for His direction. Sometimes we hit notes that can only be called clinkers. I have sung so many sour notes I should have been thrown out of the choir, but something has made me persevere.

I once had a seven-year-old daughter who now sings and wings in the heavenly choir. She is the one with long brown wavy hair and one dimple in her cheek. Her name is Laurie and she must be sounding awfully sweet these days. I hear tell that one day we will be reunited. For now it is enough that God makes my words shape into essays that shape into illumination for some of you.

Hark the herald angels sing and some of them are singing to me. I pass the notes on to you.

If you love what I do, consider supporting it by buying my book or making a donation.  I have the intention to continue following my heart and sharing it with my online friends. Some of us know that the connection is more than mind-deep; it is heartfelt and powerful, indeed. I am grateful.

 

Writing is what I know best; it is how I access my intuition. I can’t explain my process, if there is one at all. For starters, the words arise from my lifelong study of truth, but my own style is definitely in the mix. As I begin to type, I have no idea what I am going to say; I trust the process that much. Brevity is a key component; that’s just how I roll.

I like to reach down into the compost pile and turn over some dark, rotten, mulchy stuff to add to the light that interplays among the paragraphs. “And the worms crawl in, and the worms crawl out,” and all that good fertilizer. God created earthworms and skull bones and dark shadows that play in the light.

Who is writing these warped little words? Yesterday she spent a few hours watching her designer put finishing touches on her great room and kitchen. The designer is a watercolorist with a fine eye for detail. She admired the water colors that my mother had painted, as they are hung throughout my house. My mother had a wonderful decorating sense; me, not so much. I have some beautiful things I treasure, but they aren’t worth any money. I lean toward pottery and textured surfaces. I am also a neatnik and like everything in its place.

So when cancer crashed down around my ideas of motherhood, it didn’t sit too well. I was up to my eyeballs in crisis. I was contemplating how to grieve the death of our daughter and at the same time, give our son as normal a life possible. There was no way I could live up to what I expected of myself. I remember one winter day when my son had the flu and we had a new puppy. My son was delirious with fever and the pup was in the garage eating his poop. I became hysterical with rage. No more, no more! I thought.

But here I am on a soft Mother’s Day morning. My son gave me a dozen roses, almost white, and a lovely card and chocolates. My home is now becoming a true respite for me. I sit and look out the glass doors onto tall old tulip poplars now a succulent green.

There doesn’t seem much left to do but be.

Writing this on Mother’s Day Eve. I have a wonderful son who knows deeply the courage it has taken me to go on. Today the decorator came out and arranged the new chairs and lamps I have gotten. She also rearranged my bookcases for me and put her lovely touch on my fireplaces. My son knows I don’t spoil myself very often, so he is happy for me indeed.

I told him that I don’t need a thing for Mother’s Day but I would love for him to drive me to a garden party that a fellow writer is giving next Sunday. I don’t drive much except around my own familiar paths to grocery, mall, doctor and dentist. Bob used to take me places I couldn’t drive to and now that falls to my son. I try not to ask him to do things that I can do myself.

We live a simple life in the old house of thirty-one years. I have watched the kids next door grow up and the boy is getting married this fall. I take daily walks through the familiar streets. Tonight I introduced myself to a new neighbor who was putting her touch on some old rosebushes. “I’m Vicki,” I said. “I’m Yvonne, nice to meet you.” And I continued on my walk, stopping to pet a Heinz 57 mutt on a leash.

In the same way, we meet together online,  shaking hands and telling simple things about ourselves. I like that. No fancy introductions needed. LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT sits on my coffee table with a handmade cross on top of it. Until I wrote that, I was mired in grief. Now the little book is out there in the world as well as in my heart. I have a feeling that those of you who have ordered and read it feel as if you know me beyond hello. I hope so.

My writing arises from a place of devastation. Out of that has arisen my voice, my healing and my present peace. One day perhaps you will know what I am talking about when I speak of a place of devastation. The richness of the dark and crumbled soil has grown a life of its own. It is that I share with you.

“I did not trust it for a moment,  but I drank it anyway, the wine of my own poetry. It gave me the daring to take hold of the darkness and tear it down and cut it into little pieces.”

~Lad Ded quoted by Alan Larus

My writing arises from within. No monitoring of content. Whatever happens is not of my own doing. I wish I could see that clearly in other areas of my life. When I think I have failed and want to blame myself. When I feel unloved and want to draw love to me. Oh, yes, that is the way of the ego.

But when I write, I do cut the darkness into manageable bits and pieces. Otherwise the terror would overwhelm me. I wake up, having dreamt of Bob not being dead yet. I am angry with him for leaving me or I am jealous of another woman (death, perhaps?)

I murmur the Jesus prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy,” over and over. I surround myself with white light, for I do not have these dreams consciously.

My mental scissors go to work and I have the scraps laid out on the table to form an essay. “Laurie,” I say to my little girl in the hospital, “You are going to be with Jesus soon.” (I had been advised by her Sunday school teacher to prepare her for her death.) She looked at me in full silence, not happy with this bit of ironic good news. She died and I was left bereft. An unread newsletter.

Bob is dying and I am so tired, so weary of his long, slow departure that I begin numbing myself, constructing a wall of “No more, no more.” He looks at me with disgust, as if I had turned traitor on him. Not on him, on what was being asked of me. “Help him live until he dies and then pick yourself up and dust yourself off.” I did. He would be happy to know that. I am strong in the  midst of my neurosis.

I go for eight years without seeing my mother, who is in a nursing home in Pennsylvania. I see her once in that period. Eight months later she is dead of lung cancer. She never knew she had it. But she had a full life, almost eighty-eight years of it. I am glad I saw her before she left. And I go on.

My life is made of bits and pieces of darkness through which I see the light. You can feel the silence around the edges of my mosaic. I know you can.

More in my book,

http://www.amazon.com/LIFE-HOLE-Thats-Wisdom-Awakened/dp/1609102770/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297273020&sr=8-1

“Life is hard to figure out.” I wrote this to a good friend in an email. And she wrote back:
When you’ve got it all figured out, please let me know!  (big smile)

If that doesn’t make you smile, I don’t know what will. Here I am, a supposedly mature adult on the path of inner development who doesn’t have it figured out yet.  I could claim to be super-enlightened, but that is becoming commonplace.  I had rather cop to the plea of “Only don’t know.”

So I am going to go out on a limb here. I don’t know who I am or why I am. I only know that I am. Surely that is enough if you pay close attention to how hard life is. And we are life itself pretending to be otherwise.

I am love pretending I don’t know it or remember it. I stub my toe on the Rock of Ages. I lug my cross grimly up to Calvary. I sit down and shriek, tearing at my clothes and storming heaven. I have forgotten that I am the Christed One. I don’t have it figured out yet. When I will, it will be the Second Coming.

The Second Coming is close at hand and so am I. I run right into the brick wall of thought again and again. I think I can figure it out. “Take no thought for tomorrow” doesn’t work for neurotic little minds who want to win or avoid losing. It doesn’t work during dark nights of the soul. But the sun shines on it all.

In case you are wondering why I call myself a spiritual writer, it is because I know how wrong I can be. That is my main qualification. The others don’t amount to a hill of beans.

Writing about spirituality is as easy as falling off a log. Living consciously is a different matter. All of us are wired different genetically speaking and we get messed up in different ways. Unwinding the kinks in the machinery is an ongoing process. At the same time, no one ever existed. Don’t you love conundrums? I thought not.

I am not sure when God created paradox but it was early on. Since then, He has been swinging us like dead cats who think they have free will 🙂 Sorry, but humor figures largely in His Story as well.

I am glad that Easter is over. I cooked a good dinner and ate it alone. My son is in the kitchen now and will eat his soon. He worked today. I have dutifully eaten an entire chocolate bunny, having passed up some chocolate crosses with chocolate lilies on them. They all taste the same, no matter what persuasion you are. I have seen lovely chocolate buddhas as well. Religion can be just as fattening as anything else.

Most of you know what I am about. Pity I don’t. See, more humor on a sacred holiday. I watched The King’s Speech and enjoyed it so much. Thought Rush was as good or better than Firth. Anybody agree? There aren’t that many movies this good out there. I would say most of my Netflix picks are a disappointment.

Segueing into nonduality, I feel much the same about the plethora of online deliverers of awakening. There are too many; so many you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one (but I repeat myself.)

Have a chocolate bunny. It’ll look good on you. Tomorrow is The Day After Easter Candy Sale Everywhere. No discrimination. It’s all half off and you’d have to be half-crazy not to pick up a few dozen  (chocolate) ears.

Please order a copy of my book. (Click on the book image to the right). You will be helping me maintain the website. And donations are always needed. Let me hear from you….

Vicki

“It is for you to discover the sacred place inside yourself and when you find that, that
is the end of your desperate search here on earth.”  ~Vernon Howard

This is a sentence from Vernon Howard. It speaks to the need we all have to find a place of safety, a place where we cannot be hurt. We do not have to circumnambulate Arunachala or make a pilgrimage to an outer location.

What is the alternative?

Invert your mind to find out. Bring the focus into your heart and breathe.

There it is. The sun is rising inside the sacred space of the Self. You are the sun. You are the Self.

You may rise and go out into this mirrored reality. Who knows? The tao flows in all directions once it is located inwardly.

All of you should have ordered my book by now, either from amazon or booklocker.com. If not, please consider ordering it. I wrote it from my heart and just read something from a book called Einstein’s God, by Krista Tippett. She is interviewing Sherwin Nuland about his book, How We Die. He says, “Do you know what I learned from writing that book, if I learned nothing else? The more personal you are willing to be, and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.”

LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT is my own intimate look into how it feels to be on the path and be caring for someone who is dying. Do you dare to read it? If I could dare to write it, maybe you would discover your own fears and loves as I stumbled through mine. Also, every sale helps me offset the costs of publication. I am one woman in a world of a billion books. Every now and then I need to ask people to buy it. No one yet has said they were sorry they did.

From an amazon.com review by hbarrett:

“She accomplishes with beauty what so many spiritual writers fail to do — describe awakening as it occurs in ordinary life. In her case, the ordinary life includes caring for her very ill husband, Bob, at the same time that she maintains an uncompromising look at the movement of her own spirit. There is no question that the message in Vicki’s book is that ordinary life is IT!”

Consider ordering a copy or make a small donation to the site so it may continue on. This is a labor of love but the occasional donation is greatly appreciated.

Send me a message on the comments page if you would like to order a signed copy. You  may also order from amazon.com or booklocker.com if you should prefer an ebook for your Kindle, etc. Let’s make LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT an underground bestseller.

Vicki Woodyard

http://www.amazon.com/LIFE-HOLE-Thats-Wisdom-Awakened/dp/1609102770/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297273020&sr=8-1

 

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Sometimes the soul takes a rest from this world. Sits quietly among the thronging thoughts until they depart one by one. Left alone with the void, one becomes the void. Surprisingly, the thoughts are respectful at last. They wish me no harm and are happy to evaporate into the nothingness from which they arose.

I am sitting in a cluttered dining room at my cluttered desk. It’s been messier since the kitchen was painted. Boxes sit around waiting to be delegated but I am not able to carry out orders to them quite yet. The spring green of the trees outside my window are chartreuse. I see two old squirrel nests abandoned and as messy as my desk.

Stillness has arisen amidst the clutter. Shhhhh.

The intellect wants to crucify awareness. This is the story of humankind. The evolving intellect is like a parasite taking over a strong and  healthy tree. Every time I see wisteria in beautiful lavender flower, I am reminded that it is a parasite. Our minds are feeding off our strong and beautiful essence.  Awakening is about seeing that.

I come from parents who were from uneducated. My mother went to college for only a year before her father told her she must go to business school, and so she did. But she was naturally intelligent and had a deep interest in spirituality. She gave me books that I immediately loved.  Yogananda, Joel Goldsmith and many others. I took to the path like a duck to H2O.

My father had to leave school in the eighth grade. But he was so bright he ended up starting the first pharmaceutical company in Memphis, Tennessee. I get my writing ability and humor from him.

What happened to me was what happened to every child in the world. My intellect became predominant. My parents wanted to be educated and so they did it themselves, in a sense. I made all A’s and graduated from college. I loved to read and built a fort of thought around myself to keep me safe. Once the fort is built, it must be taken down brick by brick by brick. That is the path in a nutshell.

Inside the bricks resides the Self. I have never fit in to this world. I was born with a knowing that I was somehow in the wrong place. At thirteen I began having panic attacks and agoraphobia. This became social anxiety, and I still have a certain degree of  it to this day.

At the same time, I exist in a field of grace. A place where my inner knowing thrives. I seek to drop the bricks of thought and revel in this field. I try to share it with my readers by just letting my fingers say what they will.

I know some of you relate to this, because it is every soul’s story. It is the story of the prodigal son or daughter that one day wakes up in ruin and decides to make the journey back home. We all know what is going on, how we are taken in by our thoughts and made to forget our true heritage. Suddenly I see the real possibility of remembering.