Stranger to Love

We’re sailing in a strange boat.
We’re heading for a strange shore.
We’re sailing in a strange boat.
We’re heading for a strange shore.
We’re carrying the strangest cargo
Ever hauled on board.

From Strange Boat by Mike Scott
The Waterboys – Fisherman’s Blues

This is the opening to a wonderful song written by Mike Scott of the Waterboy`s. It is called Strange Boat. I love this song. I have spent many hours reflecting on and trying to write a story based around this songs invitation to my heart. This story is still being written.

For this Irish mystic storyteller this song has level upon level of meaning. It is ultimately, I think, a song about estrangement. It reflects the fact that many of us have become strangers to who we are and thus why we are. On one level the song is about who we think we are and as a consequence how strange this journey of life appears to many of us at some stage on the journey.

At this time of writing this opening verse reminds me that the strange boat we are sailing is the body. They strange shore we are headed to is death and the strangest cargo ever hauled aboard is the sense of separateness from Love that we call ‘Ì’ or ‘me’ and ‘mine.’

Those who have had any kind of mystic revelation will tell you that this is truly a strange way to live in the world. It is the way of estrangement from real life. This estrangement accounts for most of the suffering in the world that has ever been and ever will be.

When the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich says, “All will be well, all manner of things shall be well,” we tend to think, “What kind of planet is she living on.” The answer is the shore of non-estrangement from Love.

For this writer this song is a song of remembrance of that other shore which we will all arrive at because we can never truly leave it. We will all one day arrive home and become Lovers of who we are and why we are. When this happens you will laugh at the very idea that you can ever be a stranger to Love.

The strange cargo we are all carrying is the burden of the individual ‘I.’ We think we have to do it all. We think we are this thinker in a body living a limited time frame within a time space dimension. That is part of who we are but it is not the whole or the holy revelation of what it is to live ones full potential. Those with insight, those who are seers, see beyond this limitation and this estrangement. They invite you into that which is not at all strange but appears to be so only to the ego.

Buddhists use the metaphor of the other shore for the state of enlightenment. Enlightenment is experienced when you expand into awareness beyond this strange cargo called ‘I’ that keeps you apart from the light. It cargo isn’t needed because you are Life living Life and not something apart from Life. This can be known directly but one has to give up the strange cargo called “little me.” Most of us will not give up our sense of separate self for what we consider the strangeness of Love.

Close to it All or Any Song will Do

Birdsong brings relief
To my longing.
I am just as ecstatic as they are
But with nothing to say!
Please, universal soul, practice
Some song or something, through me.

Rumi – Birdsong
Translated by Coleman Barks

The singer songwriter Melanie (who is probably best known for the Bicycle song – I rode my bicycle to your window last night, I skated to your door at daylight) sings a song called Close to it All. It includes the words,

If I had my dream I would fill a hall
And tell all the people tear down the wall
That keeps them from being apart of it all
Cause you gotta get close to it all.

If I had my dream I would build halls and have people sing heart songs each morning in circles ranging from twenty and more. I would then prescribe this as an antidote to depression, loneliness, hopelessness and many other experiences of emotional distance that keep us from being apart of it all.

Many of us feel powerless. We feel what we have to say is of little value. We have no energy to say what we value. We have little or no time to find out what it is we value. Thus the universal soul of Love cannot practice some song, or something through us. The result is that we are left to do our life and lose our ability to be Life living as Love.

Even if you cannot go to a hall to sing you can choose to begin each morning with some practice, some something that invites the heart to sing. This does not mean that you choose to sing a song although you might choose to do this. Begin your day with the intention that you will value your unique heart song. Make this a silent invocation. You might not know what that is. Simply begin to invite and trust that you will receive intimations of what is to be sung through you.

Do not immediately rush into the day. Do not turn on the news that invites you into fear, powerlessness and armours you sensitivity to life and to the pain and sorrow in the world. Heartsong will open up your heart. Without your ability to feel heart centred life is lived without the experience of joy. Joy is your birthright. It is felt when anything of the universal soul is sung through you.

Find out what inspires you and aspire to express that feeling. Risk what it takes so that this feeling of inspiration expands and invites others to expand. Expansion is the nature of the Universal song. Do not be afraid to become so expansive that time disappears and all that is left is the singing. This is the direct experience of Love.

You might spend ten minutes in silence; you might put on a CD of music that moves you to dance or to tears. You might read poetry that changes you life. You might pray a prayer for yourself and others. You might practice mystic seeing. You might play a musical instrument. You might sit in your garden and say, “Thank You.”

There are, as Rumi says, hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. What Rumi is saying and asking, “When was the last time you felt like throwing yourself to the ground because you couldn’t believe the wonder of who you are.” This is the invitation to the song of your heart. Make it real for you.

Whatever is written in Your Heart?

Whatever’s written in your heart

That’s all that matters
You’ll find a way to say
It all some day

Gerry Rafferty

Here are lines from a song written by a soul friend. They are point you toward a place you will find what matters. Every song can be an invitation to the Great Song, the song that you alone have come here to sing. This is a metaphor.

You are not required to be a singer, although you might be that. You are, however, required to be a singer although in the sense that you are to sing the Infinite as it plays through your heart.

The heart is not just a physical pump; wonderful as this instrument is that pumps our life’s blood around the body. The heart is a dimension that spans time and the timeless. Without a direct experience of this connection you can have all the things you want but it does not matter that much. The heart is the bridge between the human and the Divine.

Heart work focuses on what matters. What really matters to the heart is beyond person, the mask. What really matters to the heart is the Universal, the timeless qualities of beauty and grace. These are qualities that you cannot buy but that you realise. You don’t make them. They come through what Eckhart Tolle refers to as ‘portals.’ These are place of threshold where the heart engages with its Lover and Creator.

You and I are writers. We write our life’s expression in each thought we think. What we think about we become but what we think about is not necessarily what we are intended to become. This writer was intended to become a teacher of yoga long before this word was the household word it is today. Instead, this writer trained and became engaged in the work of an accountant.

All through this writer’s life people would say, “ Tony, you’re not, you cannot be an accountant!” But I was and that I remained despite their vocal scepticism. However, I found a way to do the work of an accountant with the values that wanted to create a yoga teacher. This did not make me wealthy but it kept me sane.
The heart loves one thing more than any other. It loves to expand. Expansion means breaking boundaries. It means being willing to let go and move into the new. The ego tends to dislike this. It dislikes this because with the heart the ego gets dissolved and becomes at one with the boundless.

We each write a script for the heart. We do this everyday. The script we write has two broad directions. One leads us down a narrow road and the other onto the highway. Each signpost that takes us there looks the same. They have the same words written large on them.

The signpost reads, “This way to heart matters.” Most people follow the road to the highway. When asked why they choose that route they often deny that it was because that was the way most people seemed to be headed. This Irish storyteller headed for the highway of accountancy because, to be honest, he had not the heart strength to go another way.

Actually, what happens is that you will find a way to say it all some day. This ezine, this website, is the way this storyteller’s heart learns to say it all, not someday, but everyday. The heart does not just say what it wants to say on one day. It is saying what it wants to say in every moment. Fear and doubt get in the way.

What really gets in the way is you – your sense of separateness from Love. What gets in the way is that sense of unworthiness.

What matters to the heart is not what matters to you but what matters to Love. You think you are separate from Love but Love is not separate from you. Your heart knows this. Your heart longs to remember this. This is the meaning of yoga – to join together, to re-member.

Whatever is written in your heart will make you sing. You might sing a song of sorrow but still – it is your song of sorrow. It is not to be grudged. It is to be expanded. Your sorrow can be the invitation to deep compassion or bitterness. Usually bitterness is the calcification, the hardening over past hurts that are being said but not being owned.

The writer and creation spirituality teacher Matthew Fox says in Radical Prayer (available from Sounds True that ultimately there is no protection for the heart. There are boundaries but no protection. The greatest protection is a paradox. It is to trust the process and allow Love to write and play the universal song through you.

Picture - Writing on the Sand - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Her Place by the River

One of my favorite heartsongs is Suzanne by the wonderful Leonard Cohen. The opening verse has the beautiful invitation

Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river.
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
and you know that she`s half crazy but then that`s why you want to be there
and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
and just when you want to tell her that you have no love to give her
She gets you on her wavelength and she lets the river answer
that you`ve always been her lover.

I don`t know the personal Suzanne who invites and takes you down by the river. I do know the woman who takes me down by the river and who feeds me on the exotic. People say that it is I who am crazy to go anywhere near her place.

Have you ever gone down to the place by the river? This is the place called Life. It flows. It flows inside me and you. Or do you claim that in your life there is no water - no well spring of joy that makes you seem half crazy. Do you claim, like so many of us, that you have no Love to give her. Or do you know. Do you know within that deep inner solitude that begins to open you up and you get tuned into a different wavelength.

This river is your Source. It isn`t separate from you. It cannot ever be separate from you. It is the river of Being and to the ego it looks absolutely crazy. Most of us are more like a pond that has little flow through it. We are tuned out of the wavelength of the flow of the ever new. That is until we meet with the half crazy woman.

This Suzanne, for this writer is a kind of Priestess. She seems half crazy because she doesn`t need or depend on you and the love you think you don`t have to give her. She can attune you to the wavelength of Love. It makes you afraid because you are not used to being down by the river of Life flowing as Love in form. This is the fruit she will feed you from the far of land.

You want to get away from this crazy woman. She is too much. She feeds you what is exotic from a far away land. No, you and I want to make our excuses because being with her might mean we have to recognise that it is not she who is crazy but it is us. We are crazy for a "crazy little thing called Love. "

You might spend the night beside her, you might only spend only a moment beside her, and your attunement would be certain. This down by the river is a dangerous place to go. Her place down by the river has the sound of silence and in it you can hear and see and feel in ways that allow you to hear your unique heartsong. Are you willing to go further?

This blog to be continued


Picture - Nymph by the River - Fredrick Lord Leighton