This piece is dedicated to the dear rainforest and river of Saripiquí. Thank you for calling me and for the friendship we have shared.
Today, we were all in quiet agreement.
The howler monkeys played, made love, and jumped from tree to tree without as much as a hush, despite their namesake. A hummingbird swooped past my sight and danced along the edges of a flowering plant — the sound of its remarkable wings unreachable to my human ear. Even the butterflies’ flight seemed to agree that making a loud proclamation of our existence was simply unnecessary today. So we sat together (or rather, I sat while the howler monkeys made silent love above me) in our shared quietude, listening to the chorus of Life that reveals itself when we allow the eternal quiet of our own being to naturally emerge.
As expected, I cried. This, too, was done silently. As I have many times in endless forests, I imagined that the feelings arising from the core of my being were the same feelings Jane Goodall felt all those decades ago when her love for the living world began to root into the tree her legacy leaves behind today. I cry because I am moved by how deeply I can love and by what this love inspires in me at a time when love appears to be lacking on our dear planet.
I cry because I am moved by the living world as deeply as I am moved by the love She inspires in me, and I let the reason my spirit chose to be on this Earth at this moment in history sink deeper into my knowing. For what greater gift can I share with a world in need of love than to open our veiled eyes to witness all the ways we are loved, and all the ways we, too, can love our earthly home?
Beyond the Doctrine of Separation
I love listening. Listening is my deepest experiential practice of Oneness because, when I am truly listening, I am empty of all phenomena of Self or identity that this world solidifies into fact.
I am not a 27-year-old Jamaican-Canadian woman. I am not the things I do. I am not an aunty, a writer, an artist, or Sydney at all. I am empty of all aspects of personhood that we are called to navigate the world through, and pulled back into the eternal, shared experience of pure beingness. This attunement to what is true and eternal has been the most special revelation of my life because it keeps me anchored. It graces me with the knowing of that which is calling and inviting humanity into the next step in our evolutionary process as Life. It graces me with the persistent call to step into what has always existed beyond the doctrine of separation.
To listen requires presence within the eternal, immediate now. Presence is not — to the deep disliking of a mind endlessly thirsting for things to do — something that we do. It is the subtle, effortless, and natural expression of ourselves that requires no doing.
Have you ever noticed those moments where you are simply here before the mind arrives to name it? A moment where the world around and within you is being experienced effortlessly, in complete harmony, and then suddenly thought enters: a comment, an observation, an attempt to grasp what is already happening. We are here before something in us realizes we are here.
When I go to the forest to connect, presence is where I am always brought back to. I attune to my truest self here so that I am resourced to step into the world and share it, reflect it back, and embody it as an act of service.
The natural, internal, and quiet presence I become in the forest attunes me to the felt immediacy of the eternal now unfolding within and beyond me, and this opens me to the wordless knowing that the world around me also shares this presence.
The great “I Am.” That which is Everything, Nothing, and beyond all categorization. That which has been known by endless names and which no name can ever fully comprehend or express. God. Consciousness. Atman. Truth.
I am, as We are, and so It is.
When I am no longer bound to the conditioning of separation, I feel myself inside everything around me. I am the bird flicking their tail beneath the canopied almond tree sheltering itself from the rain. I am the line of ants guided by ancient instinct along the regenerating floor of the forest. I am the tree supporting the weight of my back.
Form gives us the miracle of experiencing infinity through difference, but beneath these changing forms, there is the same living essence organized into endless expressions. Truth reveals itself everywhere.
This is a beautiful thing to know and to live within. And the greater inquiry of my being is this: how can the truth of our Oneness be expressed and honoured through all layers of our culture and existence?
Oneness — too often intellectually understood — has been reduced to a pulling away from the 3D, a truth available only through detachment from the world. I want to explore how to become a vehicle through which this Truth is activated and amplified in tangible, unquestionable ways. I want to find and be with the people who are also curious about becoming a living invitation into this as an act of Love and service to this living world and the Great Mystery that births it.
Expand the Channel Through Which Love Can Flow
In a moment of hypothesizing about what I would do if a dear friend expressed romantic love for me, I accessed a code that is helping me step more deeply into this inquiry.
I told myself that I would receive his love, but that I could not express it in the way he wanted. But just because I cannot express it in the way he wants does not make my love for him any less than the love I could hold for him in a romantic context. Because there is no hierarchy in love.
My love for the living world is the same love with which I love my mom. My love for my mom is the same love with which I love humanity. My love for humanity is the same love with which I love my future children, my lovers, my partners, the air I breathe, the food that nourishes this body, imagination, and coffee ice cream.
There is no hierarchy in love.
In living this way, I feel myself expanding into a wider channel through which Love can move freely. The more I loosen my grip on the forms love must take, the more I am able to recognize the sacredness already present everywhere around me.
Perhaps this is what quiet makes possible: it allows what is eternal to emerge from beneath the noise of conditioning. I become filled by the love already here.
What is difficult, to the mind and to a culture that depends upon concrete answers, is that there is no guideline for this inquiry — leading me once again to the necessity of being present, attuned to, and in relationship with Life through inner clarity, responding to what Life offers me in complete non-resistance from this quiet presence.
Here, it seems, the first step emerges: deconditioning.
Choosing to live in embodied inquiry — grounding spiritual truths into practical reality — holds no value within the established system.
Choosing to live in embodied inquiry of what it means to live, love, build, create, and imagine from my attunement to the Oneness of being holds no value within the established system.
So I am deconditioning my being from its non-consensual compliance with the ways of living, loving, and relating that I was conditioned into.
This often requires remaining within the tension this deconditioning creates in the mind (and in its home within all our cells), for it has no secure foundation to hold onto if it lets go of conditioning.
But I am not the mind, nor am I the person the mind has conceptualized me to be (although I really do love her).
So this conflict within the mind is not personal. It is the necessary process we must all move through as we unlearn finding security in a world that conflicts with the deepest truths of reality and the core of Life itself.
The deeper we commit ourselves to this process and its natural contraction and expansion, the more space is created for what exists beyond this world and calls us forward.
We are already in transition. Perhaps we simply need to keep responding to the invitations that affirm our choice to serve what is trying to emerge through this moment and into what lies beyond it.
This choice excites me. It feels like a calm knowing — the “choiceless choice” that emerges from our core and springs our destinies into motion. The choice to give myself to this embodied inquiry, and to be in connection and relationship with those who resonate and are doing the same, is what has always been and will always be most true. It is my choice to love and to keep loving until that is all that can flow through my channel.
When I am with the forest, I become a possibility yearning to be birthed and expressed in infinite ways as the foundation of a mysterious and no-less-real new world. It is this that I wish to share with the world: to walk in a way that invites and reflects others back to the core of themselves until it becomes the core of us all.
It is inevitable. So it is this that I will follow- being with the forest until we all become one with the forest.