Leaving the Pity Party
Nothing Unreal Exists
Dear friend,
The inflamed skin around the insect bites I received in Angelo and Bettie’s garden are beginning to calm. Chiara has this little pot of after-bite she bought in Thailand and it seems to be helping.
This morning I heard a wood pigeon in one ear and a siren in the other, as we sat with the kitchen windows open at breakfast. It takes time to adjust to being back in the city.
A woman outside of the local supermarket started a conversation about bikes with me and someone else complimented me on my sunglasses while I was buying bread. Lots of people were moving really fast, and there were machines beeping and roaring all around. A delivery guy rode past on an e-bike wearing a motorcycle crash helmet and pool side slip on sandals.
Another guy under a tree called out that he liked what’s on my t-shirt. It says: “Nothing Real Ever Ends”. He was on his third can of Tennent’s Super Strength Lager, two empty cans sitting neatly by his side like little black and tan lap dogs.
Last night we ate home cooked Pizza in a friend’s back garden and everyone spoke Italian.
The brakes on our car sprang a leak while we were away and spilled their fluid on the tarmac outside the house. I called a tow truck and rode in the cabin to our local backstreet garage. A remix of Depeche Mode’s, “I’m Taking a Drive (With My Best Friend) played on the radio. There was a group of people in the carpark by the garage praying in a circle and you could feel the Spirit all around.
Outside the local street market, teenagers in printed vests were handing out leaflets about God and starting conversations. The legend on their bibs, “Serving People Drives Us.”
The front brake cable on my bike and the rear cable on Chiara’s have both snapped.
“What’s the universe trying to tell me?” I’m wondering.
To stop making out like I know anything that’s going on?
Accept life as I find it?
We’ve a long drive coming up.
The brakes failing while Lou (our name for the car) is sitting peacefully outside may be divine intervention. Who can tell?
Stop clinging to the mind’s limitations?
Or maybe to take the brakes off and throw myself into the many projects waiting for my attention.
No matter what, it serves to stay present in the moment.
Yesterday I was having a pity party over something that was said to me that I didn’t like.
It went on for hours, until I realised what it was happening, named it - and it was gone.
As if it had never been real in the first place.
Poof!
“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God."
That’s a quote from “A Course In Miracles” published by the Foundation for Inner Peace. It’s a home study course in spirituality. The course is as thick as a bible, but that one quote sums the whole course up in three lines.
I don’t know if anyone has ever read that quote and not needed to do the daily lessons.
Maybe they have, but that’s not me.
In my experience the world keeps on throwing up challenges and you learn from them. Sometimes it takes the discomfort of getting stuck in your head feeling sorry for yourself or angry at the world to jolt you back awake, and you realise how dreamlike life is.
We can shift into a different reality in an instant when we realise what kind of movie our mind is playing.
Dive beneath the surface of things and you find love.
Every spiritual tradition teaches the same eternal truth.
If a path teaches separation and fear, then leave it.
Why waste your life?
Chasing your own shadow.
Where does that get you?
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey