Like the Tide, like the Dawn, like the Seasons

God said:

You partake in life at the same time as you observe it. It is like you are taking your own picture. You may be a major player on the field, and yet you are in a booth taking a picture of yourself on the playing field. You record every action and often do replays, and, in retrospect, you ponder all the moves you made.

Although you may forget a lot, you recorded everything and stored it somewhere. In a sense, you are a hoarder of experience on Earth.

You are a tourist who travels to a distant land, and you want to bring back home with you every memory of scenery and architecture, art, food, and the people. You want to bring everyone and everything back with you. You want to bring home every scent and shade of color. You stick the memories somewhere within you. You have your camera and recorder going all the time. You don’t want to let them go.

What you really want is to hold everything in place. You want to stop time. You want to make the impermanent permanent. You want to stockpile the past and be able to sort through it, organize it, learn something from it, keep it with you always. Meanwhile, streams of new experience pour in, and the camera clicks and the recorder records and plays.

What you forget is that life on Earth is all a passing moment that, like the tide, like the dawn, like the seasons, cannot be held back. You forget that you are to let go of the past. You can’t keep it anyway, and yet you continue to add more to all the backload you have stuffed somewhere in your mind. Your dear mind gets crowded. You store more and more. You go through some of the past deliberately, and some of it imposes itself on you. The past is water under the bridge. The past is yesterday’s newspaper. You really can’t keep scrapbooks of every experience. Keeping the past is not a hobby you can keep up with. What you end up with is clutter.

Just as in life, you cannot keep all past possessions in a storage shed. There is no room for them. Besides, you have to let go of them. What is the point of keeping them all anyway? Sooner or later, past accumulation of all accountings and memories has to recede and make space for right now.

Travel light, beloveds. Just take a little knapsack with you, or, okay, a little backpack. Do not drag a trainload along with you. Life on Earth itself is but a brief moment.

You can’t really pack love, and yet love will go with you wherever your foot falls. Take wide steps across the land of life. You are where you are now. Do not even gather rosebuds. Let them fall where they may.

You are not meant to be a collector of life. Do not keep the war mementos and the baby booties. Life moves on, and so must you.

Every day you are a new person. You do not want to be encumbered with the past. You do not want to be encumbered.

Be light of foot like Mercury.

Let go of memories and possessions and conclusions and all that holds you back. Do not stockpile the past. You are a God-created being right now and you are made for this glimpse of Eternity that is called right now. Otherwise, you burden yourself. Take what fits into your heart, beloveds. Take Me, take you, take Us.

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water under the bridge

Goose bumps go with the reading of this Heavenletter. The language is suggestive enough to bring me close to "moments" of not rummaging through old records or making new ones. And that passing sense of nowhereness is what triggers those goose bumps.

Oneness means that there is no time, no space. Oneness is dimensionless. No distance, no duration, no before and after, no cause and effect, no thing, no point to anything, no reason for anything. It is good to hear about these things in Heavenletters, good for limbering up. But what will be left even of this when I let God talk me into that glimpse of Eternity that is called right now? For some reason I feel that our dear Author of Heavenletters is still sparing us the full blast of this message, although, for me, Do not even gather rosebuds comes close. Gathering rosebuds is just so much mental involvement, so much past and future, so much movement away from this rosebud moment. What are You telling me, God? I think it's to not attach meaning to anything. I think it's to see and love whatever presents itself without identifying and labeling it.

I am sure that only this way can I Take wide steps across the land of life and avoid being encumbered. But dear God, the world we have built can't work that way. It is built on remembering, identifying, labeling, measuring, recording. It is built on the exact opposite of the fluidity You encourage us to adopt. It is built on pinning everything and everyone down. How can we function in such a world without following its rules that are meant to ensure stasis? Okay, we'll find out.

LIKE THE TIDE, LIKE THE DAWN, THE SEASONS

DEAREST MAESTRO, GOD OF LOVE DIVINE, AT THE CENTER OF THE COSMOS,

THIS HEAVENLETTER IS LIKE ALWAYS, VERY ABRUPTLY REMINDFUL THAT WE ARE TRULY OBLIGED TO LET GO OF
MEMORIES, OF BABY PICTURES, OF ALL THINGS PASSED BY. I TODAY WILL BE MINDFUL OF THE TRUTH THAT
I CAN'T STOCKPILE THE PAST. YOU SAY, "EVERY DAY YOU ARE A NEW PERSON" FORGIVE ME FOR CALLING YOU
ABRUPT, BECAUSE I DO REALIZE IT'S IMPORTANT TO BE SO WHEN MY LIFE IS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.

HOW LOVELY TO BE LIGHT OF FOOT, LIKE MERCURY. I HAVE NO ROOM FOR ALL THE CLUTTER, AND NEITHER DOES
MERCURY , SO I'LL BE TRAVELING LIGHTLY, - MAYBE A LITTLE KNAPSACK OR PAPERBACK WILL DO THE TRICK !
THERE ARE SOME LOVELY PAPERBACKS, LIKE ONE I HAVE TITLED " EPIPHANIES."

AND HECK THERE'S SO MUCH THAT'S NEW AND EXCITING TO SAVOR! I LOVE YOU FOR YOUR LOVING COUNSEL FOREVER

Shutterbugs be ware!

Let the memories go, don't ponder them. How is this done in our kind of life?

There are lots of memories I'd love to let go of and not think of them ever but they seem to have an entrance into my consciousness that seems open to them especially when I am told to let them go.

I can't not know what I do know. Some dreadful memories of the war intrude into my otherwise joyful, love filled life. These were life changing experiences that I would happily let go if that were possible or right for me to do..

Kissing my darling wife's dead face does not haunt me or draw me into sorrow but it's not something I would consider as clutter. Watching each of my precious children take their first steps is etched in my thinker as a precious treasure that may take the form of a 63 year old bootie for my oldest son. To me this is not clutter.

I say: "God, you take all these love etchings in my consciousness and you make the kind of scrap book that sings of the beauty and complexity of life. After all it's your life."

George

make space for right now

Perhaps taking photos and making recordings of our experience is natural and cannot be avoided. And maybe it's not even us who are taking those pictures. If time and space are not, every picture, every imagination of God and man, is indelibly there in infinity anyway.

But what can be avoided is our attaching meaning and an interpretation to our photos and recordings, calling them painful, shocking, happy, boring or whatever. We learn this at an age where we don't realize what we are learning. Without knowing it, we become collectors going through their albums again and again, every new experience triggering archived ones and then being viewed in the light of antiques. No wonder many of us get the impression there is nothing new under the sun, no wonder we crave novelties instead of something truly new.

It doesn't matter. I believe it does not take anything to get out of that hoarding and counting mind and back into the vastness of just this. There is no need for any kind of project or activity, there is no need to delete or burn the archives, just to leave them to themselves and turn somewhere else. Listening to God in Heavenletters is enough. And for each of us the moment will come where some sentence or expression will finally lift us out of our archives and plans and all things of the mind and into … unimaginable, pictureless, nameless This. Well, I don't really know much about this little knapsack of right now except that it is vibrantly alive, breathtaking and a million times better than everything ever longed for.

Let go of memories and possessions and conclusions and all that holds you back. Do not stockpile the past. You are a God-created being right now and you are made for this glimpse of Eternity that is called right now. In that glimpse of right now, you feel so free, so light, so boundless, so unburdened, words can only hint at it. I know I cannot recapture that moment once it's over, so I'm waiting for You, dear God, to find another combination of words that will break my heart again the way Do not even gather rosebuds did.