Do you see the two animal portraits that the creative hand of Nature has painted on this butterfly wing?

You know what I think has been one of my greatest lessons learned from my travels? Appreciation of the absolute and astonishing Intelligence of Nature.

Why Humanity seems so concerned with trying to control, organize, and profit (exploit) from the Natural Order instead of just letting ourselves fall in Wonder of its own grace is absolutely beyond me.

When I watched the scene of North America being blanketed in a snow of death in, “The Day After Tomorrow,” I was overwhelmed in a wave of peace. My eyes actually watered up in joy of the vision of the Earth demonstrating its equanimous love of humanity (in relation to all the other ages and populations that have inhabited its house).

Equanimous Love.

I’ve been using this term a lot lately and I think an explanation is due.

Since my Vipassana sitting last February, I’ve been a regurlar practicioner of meditation. On a *near* daily basis, I sit until I find inner silence and stillness and then I go into the quiet. And there I consult with the Voice of Inspiration that delivers to me the daily news of my Theme and Reason for this day of living. (And today, by the way, that voice says, “Speak. Speak from your heart, for there are NO other words worth listening to.”)

Now I begin and end each of these mediations with daily resolutions (that were themselves given to me in meditation);

1. To give unconditional, equanimous and undefended love to all beings.

2. To tirelessly seek inspiration and share it.

3. To be an instrument of the hand of the Creative and an open channel for the flow of the Divine Spirit.

4. To walk in the physical body whilst living in the spiritual and eternal body.

5. And to think *namaste crown*, intuit *namaste temple*, envision *namaste eyes*, listen and speak *namaste mouth* only in accordance with the Truth of my heart *namaste heart*.

When I started making these daily declarations, I did not — and perhaps still do not — understand the true power of making such resolutions while in meditation.

“To give unconditional, equanimous and undefended love to ALL beings.”

But now after nine months of repeating it twice a day, I am beginning to understand both the essence and implications of this resolution.

Focusing my love on the sick or hurt or dying was easy. So instead I focused my love on the angry, mean, and mentally tormented. I focused my love on those trying to kill themselves. I focused my love on the corrupt and greedy. And I even focused my love on the president (that one sometimes took an exhausting amount of effort). I focused my love on the prisoners, but even more so on the guards that did the torturing.

And to my surprise, I found my unconditional and undefended love for all these beings. I realized that for any energy body to exert an amount of pain or torment, the tormenter him/herself must live under and equal amount of pain and/or torment; Good ol’ Newtonian logic. And the only way to heal that kind of pain is through compassionate love. Easy!

I thought.

But there is a trick to this equation that I was not conscious of when I started making the resolution…

For equanimous love leaves no room for favorites.

While deep in meditation on my love for the man who held me up at gunpoint, I did not notice my love for those physically close to me…distancing.

So now I may love the man that held me up at gunpoint as much as I love my mother. But NOW, I love my mother as much as I love the man that pointed a gun at me!

Do you see this? Do you see understand the implications of this kind of love? It means I cannot attach myself to any one love as greater, more passionate or more true than another.

Now there are things about my life path that I have never declared on this site. Perhaps because the declaration of these ideas to people around me have never resulted in any comprehension. No matter how many times I say, “I will never get married. I can’t make love into a contract of business,” or “Having children is not part of my life path, I have other things to produce,” or, “I won’t live in the States again because my personal myth cannot be contained to a country,” I always get a hit on the shoulder and a smirky smile that says, “Ah you just wait, Society will get to you one of these days! You’ll fall in love. You’ll want children. You’ll want a house and car. Just wait. And then this life of abandon that you’ve chosen will turn on you.”

But it won’t. This I know. For I have surrendered all these things in exchange for participation in my experiment with equanimous love.

How could I ever get married, if I love my partner as much as I do the Iraqi prisoner of war? How can I have a child if I respect its life the same as I do the child starving in the dumpster community of Guatemala? And how can I mourn the death of my parents when I believe with all my heart that their, and all our demise, is only part of the natural cycle of life?

When I first began to feel this, this distancing from everything that used to be important to me, I cried. Because the truth is, we treasure our attachments; We love our struggle to stay close to anything that brings us fleeting feelings of happiness. Because if for nothing else, struggle and pain make us feel alive. And feeling alive, regardless of the nature of the sensation, be it joyful or painful, is better than feeling nothing at all…or equanimously about everything.

Or is it?

Now both you and I are watching me near the end (or beginning?) of an interesting cliff. Somewhere, unconsciously, I made the choice to take this path. And the seed of that subconscious being grew, evolved inside of me, till it assumed its own walking and talking power. And now my conscious has awakened in agreement; My life is not my own. I’ve surrendered it.

I surrender my past, my future, my contracts, my relationships, my attachments, my beliefs, my opinions, my ego, and my partisan love.

All in exchange for my participation in this experiment with equanimous love.

“It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks wildly, or, “with the flower of the mind”; not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from the celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveler who has lost his way throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

(Talk of speech like thunder! That passage deserves a moment’s silence.)

So I surrender everything. I let go of the reins of the divine animal that we all ride upon and hand over control to the Instinct and supreme Intelligence of Nature.

I hereby make my life an experiment in the attempted creation of a personal Universal myth.

I’m gonna jump off this cliff. And anyone is free to watch.

I might go down in flames. But is there a better or worse way to go?

The eye of the Owl and the head of the Snake.

I dare anyone to think about this for more than a minute and not be left in undulating waves of Wonder.

> More New Pictures in the Ecuador Album

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