Small World
Dear friend,
There’s no piped music at the airport. You can hear human voices, and the sound of hand dyers. The voices are soft and gentle like a stream burbling over slick-smooth river stones.
Some caw, like crows and then laughter bubbles up. We’re the only natural things visible in the shiny corporate temple.
In the prayer room three young men enter and lounge on the blue cushioned seats, looking at their phones. They whisper sometimes but are silent while I sit.
As I leave their conversation slide back in easily, they sound tired. I wonder how it is for them to be in a place like this. They seemed very sweet, like sacred places are normal for them. Part of the fabric of their days.
So far today I’ve met a Hindu monk and a gentleman who lost his mother three days before he lost his wife. Today is the first time he’s travelled alone.
The monk gave me some general advice.
To focus on one thing and see it through to completion.
He also said that because we are infinite beings, nothing in this finite world can satisfy us. We’re always looking for more because we sense the infinite as our home.
I realise I know his order. They have a health food shop I used to pass everyday when we lived in Hackney.
Small world.
Also that the colour of his orange robes denotes service to others. He jokes about high viz vests. He’s even got orange socks.
A woman answers her phone and begins a loud conversation directly behind me, in what sounds like Cantonese. To my right a group of airport staff are chatting away happily, teasing one another and smiling.
How there can be so much division between people?
It has to be stirred up.
The false self believes it can profit at the expense of others, but at a soul level we know different.
Peace increases as you give it away. The same as kindness. Love too.
Peace love and understanding.
Why not be generous and give away all we have. We have it inside us.
Isn’t that what the world needs?
Maybe that’s the one thing to focus on.
How would it be to turn down the fearful voices, stop clicking on their baited thumbnails?
Now my flight is boarding at the gate and my heart is beating faster, timing the queue. It’s a budget airline so I find it pays to be one of the last, they’re less inclined to be fussy about hand luggage the nearer you get to take off.
I can feel my conditioning straining at the leash. It’s hard to resist joining a queue when you’ve been raised on this island.
I can see one of the attendants playing hardball with the carry on luggage allowance, so I’m hanging on till the last minute. Amazingly adrenaline is pumping around my body.
Like there’s some kind of danger going on.
There isn’t.
We’re safe and all is well.
We need to know ourselves as we really are. Immortal spirit, temporarily incarnating as complicated, conflicted creative creatures.
Seeking something we already have.
Which is why it’s called self realisation.
Realising who we are beyond surface appearances.
One love drenched consciousness manifesting universes, galaxies in all the unfathomable depths we contain.
Above the clouds the winged tube is bouncing around in turbulence thirty thousand feet in the air.
And my heart. Calm as anything. Content for the moment to be flying into the unknown.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey