lies in the heart of chaos …

Are you wondering whether you should leave your spiritual practices and spend your time resisting the harm being done? Are you trying to decide if you should quit spending so much time on your own baggage and instead, help to allay the suffering of others? Your wondering is life life-ing, life doing what it does through the apparent beingness of you, a caring spiritual person.

Or maybe you’re a more material girl wondering whether it would be better to meditate more, put down the damn phone, or turn off the tablet, whether you’d be happier with your head in the sand or god forbid, in the hands of that guru you just met. That wondering is also life life-ing, life doing what it does through the apparent beingness of a material person.

Wondering, sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly, begins to look like movement—acting, reacting, acting and reacting again.

Throughout the process judgement arises, of others, and oneself. Am I doing this right? Are they doing it wrong? Shouldn’t I be doing something more? This doesn’t feel right. Damn. I don’t know what to do!!

It feels a bit like a hamster going round and round on a wheel but actually going nowhere at all.

What difference does it make if it is all life life-ing anyway? Ah … now that’s a question.

Does it matter? Could I not care if I care? Could I not do what I do? Could they? Does what we do matter at all?

If we assume that life is pre-destined the answer ‘might be’ no, but it isn’t pre-destined. It’s improvisational jazz, a symphony of horns blowing the next moment into manifestation out of the breath of this one.

What we do absolutely matters, and doesn’t matter at all, both simultaneously. We are the breath through which the moment is born, the chaos and the order, the good and the bad, and in actuality, nothing is happening. What!? It’s definitely happening here. I feel it. It’s real and it’s not good!!

There is the precious painful joyful sorrow-filled experience of here and now, you and me, harm and suffering. That is undeniable. With that said, and deeply felt, there is no here, no now, no you or me. There is no harm, no suffering, no politics to decry. Nothing is happening. Nothing ever happened.   

But, to say one matters and the other does not is a fallacy. To attempt to choose the material over the spiritual or the spiritual over the material is impossible and yet, that is what the appearances, the breaths made manifest do. This we call ‘we’ appears to choose, to determine, to decide, to judge, to resist, to support, to hate, to love.

There is no material without the spiritual and the spiritual would be aware of nothing without the material. They are truly indivisible whether we are aware of it or not.

Awareness, not elementary awareness which each of us has (is), but experiencing being consciously aware of what this is and what you are, makes it easier to be in the game, to play your role, to be a you, separate and alone, an apparently separate human being living in a world with other separate human beings. Rather than being a holy terror, it outs this appearance of separation as amazingly potent, stunningly mind-blowing, miraculously precious.

If you have a choice, which it appears you do since you seem to be making new ones all the time, you will act in alignment with your current best understanding. Everyone does. It may not seem that way because the current best understanding for each of us varies. We see different things as important. We view the world through our own unique lenses. We carry varying levels of trauma and healing.

We cannot see what we cannot see until life gives us a specific new experience so we can. That’s what’s grand about life. It simply can’t help itself. It automatically shows us where we are resonating, what we are holding onto, the beliefs we make into our gods, the ways we withhold our own exquisite beingness from the world.

That’s good news.

It’s going to be messy. Chaos always is. Chaos is the natural state when change is taking place. Right now, most of us have one foot in the old world and one in the new. We are standing right in the middle, in the heart of chaos. New experiences are piling on: listening to all those new podcasts, reading articles, being witness to the suffering of others, breathing one more breath conscious of the freedom to do so, looking into the eyes of a beloved and seeing their fear. Each one inalterably changes us.  

It’s easy to slide backwards, to return to what is comfortable and we might. Whatever happens couldn’t happen any other way. It’s imperative to be gentle with ourselves, trust the process, whatever it is and grant that same grace to each moment.

Moving through the change may not be happening as fast as we’d like. It most likely isn’t, but it is happening. That’s what life is, all of life, even when it seemed more comfortable. Comfort is overrated. Being uncomfortable, being sad or angry doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. The juice of transformation lies in the heart of chaos.


Amaya Gayle is the author of Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY

Image: The Haunted Heart of Chaos, by Chordus, Deviant Art