Meeting up with a group of us, one sunny Saturday in Macclesfield, James said he had been ‘crocussed’ on his way there.

I remember sharing his enjoyment… and earlier had seen the grounds of the cemetery of the nearby churchyard, through which he had walked on the way. They were spangled with this amazing array of freshness…of shape and light, of colour…
The mind, metaphorically ‘mirror-like’, was momentarily filled with an un-mediated perception….a display including masses of what, in the English language, are reduced to the label …’crocuses’!

I’d suggest that revelation…no ‘thing’ in itself…yet stunning and heart-opening …was available in its fullness through receptivity…through presence.

In one of the macclesfield talks, maybe that one, I learned from James about how perception comes first and is direct…but is so quickly veiled by the secondary movements of abstract conceptualisation.
We make our own ‘sense’ of the perception through applying and incorporating an interpretational overlay … formed from whatever thoughts feelings memories associations come to mind in the moment.

Often there’s so much that we don’t even register what’s around when we’re walking… maybe hurrying… along the path towards ‘something’…
We’re busily thinking about what might happen, has happened, or is happening…maybe how something or someone else is…
So, partially abstracted from life, within the dimly-lit thought-cupboard, we’re distracted into giving our own meaning to whatever imagined absent ‘something’ which arises for me..

As we look… and then conceptually conceive ‘through a glass darkly’… the spacious bandwidth available for receiving and responding to ‘how it is’ is artificially constricted by our egoic pre-occupations.
And so we become more estranged from the ‘happenings’ of the broad experiential field of now – whilst also being a non-dual aspect of that field.

If this strangely estranged view…a view from a window in an encapsulation within openness… is the starting point for our engagement with others, then being able to respond into a situation from the fullness of our potential… appropriately, as required – is a very long shot!

And the more we believe that view to be more than situationally true for me, within relative reality … well, the world’s non-sense shows how that goes…

We happily have the luck to come across the dharma teachings and meditations which offer ‘de-encapsulation medicine’ free of charge!…
They can invite ‘bursting the bubble of self’… which sounds dramatic and painful…and something the ego wouldn’t want to do…but we have a nascent wisdom which moves us in that direction…
And we can see how actually…it’s locating oneself inside the bubble which is a cause of suffering and a painful constriction of our potential.

The teachings facilitate our softening and relaxing out of any circumscription, any fixed shape.
A release from the constrictions, being breathed by the life of the moment into….?… let’s see… : )

Evening-time now…the crocuses have closed their flowers…for the night : )

P.s. This post links with the previous one, of the new recording… part (ii) of Love and Impermanence