"it will come to you..."

"look for the bare necessities
the simple bare necessities
forget about your worry
and your strife...

have I given you a clue...
the bare necessities of Life
will come to you..."

In the comments section following the Youtube video clip of Mowgli and Balloo singing "Bare Necessities" from Disney's The Jungle Book, a viewer asked this question: 

"remember how you felt when you heard this song for the first time
and how you slowly fell in love with it." 

It was such a sweet sentiment, and full of a parent's backward-looking melancholy...a feeling I could relate to all too easily. 

I thought about the first time I remembered seeing this film, and hearing this song.  Images of my toddler-age daughter washed over me.  Of course, it was 1992...right?  But, wanting to get the year of its release right before writing about it, I went to Wikipedia, and to my shock, I discovered that"The Jungle Book" had been released in 1967.  1967?  Really?  I couldn't remember ever seeing that movie, or hearing any of its songs, until I was a mom, and I was watching it with my own children. 

That got me to thinking.  I have a pretty good memory.  And  I am sure that with 7 younger brothers and sisters, I must have been exposed to the movie, and heard the songs.   But, for some reason, they just didn't "reach" me.  Perhaps it was because by 1967, I was a teenager, and no longer really interested in animated films, but to have no recollection of the movie at all...I'm baffled.  

But that said, fast forward to 1992.  As the mother of a toddler, I was not only interested in Disney movies, I was watching them...or listening to  the songs...over, and over, again.   And not only was I watching them, the content of their messages were suddenly very important to me.  I was asking myself:   How would their messages resonate with my young daughter?  Did it have a deeper meaning, that I could build upon?  Were the characters good role models?  What were they encourging my child to think about?

And since I was also trying to navigate being a mom while navigating my own spiritual practice of spiritual exploration, self-discovery and healing, those messages easily entered my world as metaphors for life's lessons in understanding God's presence, and power, in the world around me.  The overarching struggle for the supremacy of good woven through each story, seemed to just jump off the screen. 

So when a friend, after reading a recent piece on the poetry blog, called, "your one necessity..." (copied below), sent me the link to "Bare Necessities," I totaly "got it."  I love the spiritual message in Balloo's encouragement to Mowgli:

"...don't spend your life looking around
for something you want, that can't be found.

When you find out you can live without it,
and go along not thinking about it...
the bare necessities of life will come to you..."

The very inspiration, insight, awakening to a deeper sense of life purpose we often think is hidden and obscure, is actually not hidden at all.  And it is not something "out there" to seek.  It is already "within you."   And like the ubiquitous Brood XIX cicadas that have reached the acme of their 13 year cycle, when our hearts are ready...to give birth to whatever it is we are awakening to be, next...we can't stop it.  It not only comes to us, but, it comes from deep within us. 

It is always percolating up from the depth of our spiritual wholeness...in fresh, new, marvelous ways.  It's always been there, just like "The Jungle Book" had been in my life since 1967, but I wasn't ready for its message until "just the right moment" and then, every song, every bit of dialogue, every sequence, seemed to sing like the cicadas.  So loudly, it couldn't be ignored.   The subtle Kaa's hypnotic lullaby.  Shir Khan's confident alertness.  The mind-numbing group thinking of the vulture band....all of it, a feast of inspiration, when I was most hungry.

And like the cicadas, I believe that our spiritually evolving sense of vision, and purpose, emerges gently, at just the exact moment we are ready, perfectly poised,  to take the next step.  And then, we shed our old worn-out shell, and start to sing a new song in unison with the universe...a song we'd been humming, deep beneath the earth, for as long as it took for our "moment to arise..." I totally "got it." ... 

Sigh...this is a lovely universe...

Here is the post (and poem) that prompted my friend to send me the link:

"I think it would be well, and proper,
and obedient, and pure,
to grasp your one necessity and not let it go,
to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you."
— Annie Dillard

"how will I know
what is my one
necessity..."
i ask the wiser Voice within

It smiles back,
"it will be that thing
you once thought you might have lost,
and in the space of your
awakening
realized you could not
bear to live without..."

it will be what waits within the
emptiness carved out by the
sorrow of dreaming
it was nearly gone,
only to wake and
discover that,
you were
just asleep to your own promise....

it will be the thing
your tears have watered
back into life,
called back into beauty,
and brought back
from blight...

it will be all 
you once thought
you could, possibly
do without,
surrender,
dismiss,
give up,
and then discovered there
was no "you"
without its
hot heartbeat
just below
your evenness and
calm regret...

what is your
one necessity...

what is it
that sits like
hope...patiently singing
the song without words...

what is
the shaken reed,
the shattered ice,
the shell that opens to reveal
the pulsing,
aching,
hunger for what
could never,
ever,
have beeen
lost to begin with....

it is you,
knowing Me...


with Love...

Kate

"You are Alpha and Omega...infinity"

"...You are Alpha and Omega,
Beginning and end...
You are my Prince of Peace
And I will live my life for you..."
-     Michael W. Smith

I love this Michael W. Smith praise song, "You are Holy."  It is one of those sing-with-your-eyes-closed, your-hands-raised, and your-heart-completely-bare-to-Him kind of songs.

If you read the post last week titled "Everything in its Time" about spiritual vectors, you know that I have a "starting point" and a direction.  My starting point for the last few years has been based on Mary Baker Eddy's statement...one that, I believe, was her most radical contribution to the history of humanity's search for Truth...in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"The starting point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind, -- that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle."

This is the "place" I return to for recalibration, for refreshment, for refuge and respite...it is what I rest upon, and radiate from.  It is my starting point.  If  I returned to it 200 times a day, I return to it a thousand.  I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that it sets the rhythm of my day, as much as my own heartbeat...or the in-and-out of my breathing. It is, in fact, the keynote of my own personal purpose statement.  I find it pulsing through my heart when I wake up each morning.

I spend hours a day listening for fresh inspiration from its timeless promise.  There are countless moments where I find myself staring into "space" pondering the depth of its demands upon my spiritual discipleship.  I revel in the breadth of its meaning, and am fascinated by the infinite range of its application. 

But, for the most part, the message has been more of a blue-collar feeling than a great big spiritual "aha" moment of inspiration.  That's not to say that  I didn't love discovering early on that the word "might" meant not only power, but possibility.  Because of it, I have been able to claim on countless occasions when the possibilities for answers seemed impossible, that because God, Spirit is All-in-all, that there were an infinite number of possible solutions, answers...miracles. 

I have delighted in replacing the word "Spirit" with each of the other names for God...Principle, Mind, Soul, Life, Truth, and Love. The implications are infinitely wonderful.

But today, as I was talking with a friend, trying to describe where I am finding the core strength of my spiritual confidence these days...days when I can't depend on information, validation, or outside approval to secure my inner peace...I had two things come to mind.

One was the image of two full-length mirrors...offset a bit and facing eachother...in which the reflection of the image standing in the middle goes on and on, infinitely.  And the other was the statement from Revelation:

"I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last..."

And just as I was describing this process of constantly returning to my starting point throughout the day for recalibration and orientation, I heard myself saying (in light of an earlier conversation we'd had about those spiritual vectors with no destinations...only directions) that the only place I'd really ever want to "end up" was back at my starting point anyway.  And in that moment I got it!

Any desired destination or outcome...a perfect human body, all the financial resources I could every hope for, family relationships that completely transcended the mire of day-to-day navigation and negotiation, a dream realized, a professional goal accomplished, an inspiration seen and felt...would pale in comparison to the depth, breadth, height, might, and majesty of that "place" where God is All-in-all, and where I am completely at peace because of my trust in this fact...for me, and mine, and all.  That place of spiritual intimacy, an infinte nearness I feel in the silence of His sanctuary...conscious Being. 

Annie Dillard wrote, in Teaching a Stone to Talk:

"The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega,
it is God's brooding over the face of the waters..."

I love this silence.  I love it so much I ache for it.  I ache for it for me, and for you, and for a world that is so hungry to know that there is something more, something deeper, something higher than its own mistakes, choices, decisions, votes, wants, and petulant demands. 

It is alpha and omega...the starting point that is also the only real destination or outcome that will ever satisfy, bring us peace, make us feel secure, give us something infinitely more promising than anything which the egomaniacal "self" can even try to imagine, dream into existence, want badly, make come true, demand from its loved ones,  or try to control.

It exists within, and cannot be taken from us.  It is a magna core of molten Love, the radiant reality of Being.  It is like the spiral that exists as a visual question for me:  which end is really the starting point?  I always have to ask myself in tracing its trajectory, do I start from the outermost point and move inward, or start from the innermost point and circle outward...and, you may ask, does it even matter?

I think it does. If I start from the outside...getting my information about my life, my value, my potential and what is possible...and move inwards, I feel tighter, tenser, constricted, smaller, and because everything seems so limited and restricted, I feel the need to control it, hanging on to every shred of shrinking substance...of love, opportunity, goodness, attention...worrying that what little there is, in my continuously shrinking world, will eventually disappear. 

However, starting from my deepest inner truth:

"The starting point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind, -- that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle."

From this penetratingly deep spiritual core, I can only reach outward and upward.  My life expands, radiates and includes more and more, as it circles outward, until all I am is the existence of that very All-in-allness of good, of Love,  that I started with.  I am radiating out from a place of deep contentment.  My base of operation is an unfathomable sanctuary far below the surface, deep within myself, where God, the great I AM, exists and governs.

And when two, or more, outward reaching spirals are placed "in relationship"...each reaching out and wrapping its love around the other, yet returning over and over again to its core truth...it is the symbol of eternity that appears. A symbol in which our journey continually, perpetually, eternally returns to a shared, but deeply sacred "center" whenever we are impelled outward from that center by Love.


This is where I am trying to live.

There is so much to think about...from just this one sentence...about God.

sigh...this is why I love the silence...

always,
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS