The present of presence
A poem about nature as teacher, cosmic oneness, and inner divinity.
The true gift of Christmas is presence, the remembrance giving birth to your own Divine Child, immaculately conceived from the raw material that the universe is made of. We come into this existence carrying the epigenetic imprints of the culture and our parents and past generations, but we also are the children of the forest, the mountains, the waters those allies that we sprung from and always turned to through the centuries, they're still with us. They're just waiting for us to listen, and they're always reaching out if we get quiet enough to tune in.
It doesn't always scream at us through a peak experience, more often, the change happens little by little, the awareness creeps in like the dawn, slowly breaking. Everything in religion is a metaphor, and Christ being born in a manger surrounded by farm animals is shorthand for the fact that the knowing, the Gnosis, when it really lands in your bones, it's subtle and slow. Maybe it's punctuated with lightning-strike moments, but you can't bring that to earth without something to ground it and the gift of direct experience is that when you stop trying to force it, you find that you know it because you feel it.
All of a sudden, things that used to confound you seem easier, truths that used to perplex you seem clearer and that comes from resetting, getting quiet, clearing out all the noise so you can hear the signal of your own inner voice. That's the Christ that's amassing in your consciousness. It's not something given to you in a book or lectured from a pulpit. It's what you've sensed inside you in the clear light of darkness. It's what's reflected in nature, our original teacher. It's what happens when a Robin lands on a branch right near you and just stays there, blinking, not even afraid. It's what happens when you see a beautiful sunset falling, when you step into the forest and feel your nervous system regulate or anytime you close your eyes and just draw in that original gift, the one we most take for granted because it's always present, until one day it isn't: the breath. When you look at things through this lens you see that human existence, in a sense, is dissociation: imagining we're separate. The trick is to learn to dissociate voluntarily, consciously, feeling out the boundaries of where we end and other things begin, realizing when to turn to our teachers and our resources and when the answers we need are within. They're always there, but sometimes we need someone to direct us to them, and that's okay—as long as we don't give all our power away. The key is not seeking power-over but rather, empowering. The culture says power games are how to get ahead, But that's not the way the universe is. It's a dance of symbiosis and reciprocal existence, learning when to follow and when to lead. The ballet, where everyone has a part to play, the Greatest Show on Earth, the circus, the performance where we pretend to be separate. And we rehearse this, but there's no getting it right. That's a fallacy of written history. Committing things to one fixed version is a recipe for feeling like a failure, forever being measured and coming up short. History is written by the dominators but true knowing is carried in the stories we tell with our voices and hold in our bones, imprinted on our souls: the gnosis.
When you make something outside yourself a deity, whether it's a guy born in a manger, a priest or a president, a job or money, a relationship or an identity or even the medicine, you give away your power, and then anyone can control you. Growing up, my conception of a deity was something that was always judging me and finding me unworthy, because that's the legacy of religious-industrial-consensus reality. And this meant that my conception of a holy entity was something I needed to circumvent, to trick and hide from in order to evade the judgment of acting in accordance with what my body was trying to tell me and prove myself deserving, so I looked for loopholes and shortcuts, side doors through which to enter, and the beauty of it now is that the wound becomes a power. Now that my bones remember I am worthy, I can use these tactics to subvert the system of forgetting. The truth is that I am the Christedness, the medicine, I am the entheogen, another term for psychedelics which means "that which awakens the divine indwelling." Because life is psychedelic, and everyone carries Christ consciousness. We are the ecosystem, and we are embedded in it, so trying to get around or confound it is only cheating ourselves in the end.
It's all about balance and reciprocity, giving and taking from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The gift of Christmas is the present of your presence, feeling it in your bones, restoring your body, mind and soul to oneness.
