Approaching the eve of the end of 2017, bamboo bombs are exploding in the green, green field in front of me. BOOM! The sound pierces and rends the air, and while the intrusion is violent, will anyone stop the teenagers having their way? Today? Ramping up for a rambunctious, ribald celebration, this is it. The kids seize the day. This of course is not the only way or day the Hindu Balinese sanction for eruption of emotion through voice that splits the wind, and through activated motion that appears to suspend the rain. The end of 2017 signals for me an ending of a whole cycle of several years. This is a closure of great significance with lasting impressions of the trials and verifications that have played invaluable parts in empowering mine and my family’s lives. There is a tremendous momentum behind this entry into the next chapter, resourced by wizened experience and master-minded through the matured camaraderie of self-selected individuals in conscious play. A play that is inclusive of all the pieces—those that fruit in place, those that fly to multiply and recolonise, and those that tend to drift astray. Over this last year my public identity has been appropriated, assaulted and fallaciously branded as “abusive, dangerous cult leader”, along with other teachers known to me, all of us enriched both privately and publicly relative to any such reflection confronted, the pain of it assimilated and lessons held dear. Touched by truth and lie alike, what remains untouched is subject to neither, in either so-called victim or so-called aggressor. Untouched in us, no matter what end of polarity we momentarily might appear to represent, is the all-of-one consciousness and the one consciousness in all. It is to the instrument of this remembrance that I bow. The remembrance of the difference in unity. Which means I bow to each person playing their part in the enactment of a remix that inevitably resolves without dispute in one eternal truth—that we are reflecting for each other more of how we are each at one with the singularity that is ever greater than all our parts together. All in good time, the parts and roles are revealed in their function and dysfunction. Without a protagonist, the story stalls. But once the self-elected protagonist whores out their truth to profit from lies, all to exact revenge for slights imagined or borrowed, they are slave to their self-image and their story stalls, until they rewrite their script and relinquish the costume. When pretenders parade the long lost wounded and perverted like a host of undead, they might become twisted from looking over their shoulder, until they see for themselves the silver linings in their clouded sky and fashion the bullets that set free the foaming-mouthed army they called forth. Meanwhile, an immense amount of energy is trafficked through the uprising and quelling of doubt, inquiry and judgement, as the audience and players come together for the reach and release that translates as total gain. To the understandable chagrin of those whose misery is addicted to company—we can also respectfully decline to take the stage—a stage that might become a cage when we care to engage with those who forgot we are all essentially at play. Innocence is free in being so, by nature of its innate self-validation. And in our clear conscience, the conscious choice remains ours to make. Who’s in play? And how to proceed in a way we see how much can be remembered in one day and how much one forgot? How indeed to discern the degree and nature of the forgetting in those who say they want to play. Who is in play and who is played? And who knows we are in play even when feeling played? By reviewing and removing the cause of misunderstandings and misrepresentation in our own selves, my family and I are walking on, in play, knowing that we are committed to remembrance through all the roles fluidly explored in response to the other. True to nature we are choosing health, which for my family and I, means allowing the ebb and flow of life lived wakefully to guide us to the places left for us to go. Greener are the pastures we have heavily fertilised through the purging of the superfluous. Refreshed are the networks of interaction we have watered by tears of sorrow fully felt and wept away. We became so still in the trenches and walked with great care through encroaching walls. The tightening narrows focus. The pressure concentrates resolve. We recognise the hallmarks of Saturn’s tempering influence and heavy hand. Each blow of fate chisels deeper the marks of mastery and each round in the furnace serves to prime our molten quintessence for the forge. Given over I am to the process that pulls me apart conscious into this particularised and therefore limited vessel of limitlessness. Given over I am to the play, wiser than ever to the sheer potential of unfettered joy when we come together in ripening recognition of this indescribable opportunity, if not responsibility to be ourselves, even as we discover the oneness of being in all the pieces we fall into and dissolve. For whom opportunity and responsibility mean the same, imagine the calibre of practitioner called into play? I do. And I call it as it happens. Such is the joy that builds in anticipation of the circles forming now for the new years ahead. Gatherings that are as much a result of previous interactions as they are of an openess to fresh connectivity and uncalculated change.
