Getting into the Gush

Life gushes. The sea's waves gush shoreward. The droplet of rain joins with others and gushes to the sea. (or directly into the earth) New life gushes out everywhere, in predictable cycles and in spontaneous events. Energy bundles and builds and spews itself out in demonstrations sometimes welcome, but often feared. But life does gush, without seeming limit.

I'm afraid that I have often put myself outside of the gush of life. I have not expected it, I have sat in a stupor, undeserving of its benefit, or I have feared it for I knew I could not control it. In effect, I have kept in place the resistance that keeps it from spilling over me.

But life still wants to gush. I look at others who have accepted the limitlessness of life, and I reason that they are lucky, or that they don't have the hindrances that I do, and my glance into their experience carries a hint of jealousy. I see all that is beautiful and bountiful, but it has only momentary benefit for me, for I soon sink back into the quagmire of my muddles and my troubles.

By my way of thinking about it, I have taken myself out of the flow of life, and have often actively resisted it when I could not get out of it's way.

No more. Today I surrender. Today I flip all the switches that serve to hold back the energy of heaven, the gushing life of great good that flows to and over me if only I allow it. Today I'm risking all and getting into the gush.

Staying in the Flow

I've come to believe that life is good. I didn't always think that way; maybe I thought that sometimes it was good, often difficult. Somewhere along the way, I started thinking it was good, then thought it a little more frequently, thought it more fully. The more I think it, the more I believe it, and the more I see evidence of it in my life.

There is something bigger than my usual thought of myself that surrounds me, envelopes me, moves through me, and carries me. That's an energy that is compassionate, limitless and ever-renewing. When I allow it to carry me, my life illustrates the nature and substance of those qualities.

It is only when I get cross-current to that flow of goodness that I stop feeling good. For me, this usually shows up when I start finding fault with others. An associate I was working with last night really bugged me. She was not doing her share. She was only thinking about herself. She was selfish. And the more I thought about it, the worse I felt. But when I diverted my attention, found other aspects of the work that engaged me, interested me, I began to feel better. So simple.

if mindlessly i float down river
i take what comes
with dim appreciation


unaware,
calamity falls on me
i find someone to blame


mostly unconscious
through nearly shuttered eyes
hints of wholeness drift on by, unseen

When I stay in line with what I know to be so...that life is good, life magically is good. No new thought, but it's staying in the flow that gets me where I want to go.

A Posture of Resistance

I couldn’t read the fine print from where I sat waiting for the light to turn, but I sure didn’t miss the message. “I RESIST!” shouted at me from the bumper of the car in front of me. It was almost as though whatever was being resisted was of infinitely less importance than the posture of resistance.

I RESIST!

Now, as I ruminate on it, I realize it’s not just the car or the driver in front of me that’s at issue, it’s me, too. My girlfriend tells me that I often resist what is sent my way just for the sake of resisting, because I can’t accept good coming to me. Actually, she more often says it’s just because I’m stubborn, but that’s probably the same thing. I want to do it all by myself, and I decide to resist before the offering presents itself. Could it be that I have a posture of resistance? Heaven forbid!

What you resist persists. So goes the well-worn cliché. My resistance works for me this way: I end up maintaining circumstances and situations that I really don’t want. That’s the underlying rationale for resisting in the first place. I focus on something that I don’t want. I protest, find fault, judge all else as beneath my standards, knowing that my way and only my way is right and best. And those circumstances and situations stick to me like tar.

In the process, I disallow so much good that might come to me, proud s.o.b. that I am. My failure to appreciate the good around me, to allow it to close in on me, while I am focused on having it my way does, in effect, prevent the good that I really want from ever arriving.

Hmm…so this is the way that I block the blessing that would flow to me. I sit tight in my posture of resistance.

Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow?

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow…” So begins the doxology that I sang every Sunday in my father’s church. Lying in the shadows, seeping through the words of the sermon, forming parentheses around the strains of the invitational hymn was the subtext that retribution, punishment and curses also flowed, and if I did not ‘get right with God’ the blessings would dry up, and the consequences of my sin would catch up with me in full measure.

Not my father's church

But, what if all that flows from the Divine, the eternal, the infinite is blessing? Somehow, within me, whatever name I use for this all encompassing Source, (Love, All that is, The Universe, God) I can find nothing but blessing in it. And if that be so, what is keeping me from being the beneficiary of the flow? It makes sense that it has something to do with me.

So, let me today affirm this. God is good! Her blessings are immeasurable, stocked up, waiting to be poured out! And I have a choice to face the windows of heaven, let fall away the barriers I have built around me, and allow the blessing in…first trickling through a crack in my wall, then showering me, now flooding me, until I have no option other than to swim and frolic in it’s endless flow.

Oh, is this what a heavenly choir is?

Praise Source from whom only blessing flows.