What really has my full attention today is Presence, just being fully here. Recently we were considering the feeling experience of solitude. This has to do with being present, fully aware of all the thoughts and feelings going on inside oneself. It has to do with being in Being and just being fully surrendered to the moment.

In thinking about what I might share this morning, these words came to me:

I come as a voice from ages past.
I come to bring comfort and solace—
but not before I have rearranged every cell in your body!

We cannot live fully in that place of Being without everything we thought we knew being rearranged. And coming to that shiny new place, we recognize it as home.

The deep internal experience of being at home is felt by just being present in the energy field around us. In that I feel the deep dynamic connection I have with each one I know, each one’s unique flavor, color, texture, and with all that sensory input, still having the ability to stay present in that place.

It’s through our heart connections, our experience of opening to each other through heart and eyes, that a door is allowed to open from the larger reality where I am present. In that fullness we remember who we are and why we are here. This fullness in every moment is what I want to share.

We’ve been using the word thriving to describe some of our experiences recently. The word thriving feels so full of life, such a gorgeous way to describe the fullness of just being present. I looked up some synonyms for thriving: burgeoning—life burgeoning; flourishing, prospering. And a word that struck me as being a part of the core of thriving: robust—strong, consistent, will not be swayed or moved around.Robust—it’s a bright, positive word; it’s not heavy and confining. All these words ask for a bigger expression of who I am in any moment, of where I’m coming from, that you may see the fullness of life in movement.

It has been stated that Sunrise Ranch is both a teaching and a demonstration site. I’ve been asking myself, am I a teaching and demonstration site? Am I living the fullness of what I love, and showing you?

During the space of solitude that I found myself in last week, I was not totally alone; it was a place of recognition and understanding. I know myself there. I love the silence. Sometimes I long for a life of contemplation, as in a monastery, where I wouldn’t have to think about meals or a roof over my head or earning any money. I would be able to give up all that I am in that surrendered space, all that is physically present, into a place of being present, aware and totally yielded.

My experience of meeting loneliness or solitude for the first time was at the age of nineteen when I went on holiday on my own to a friend’s cottage on the west coast of Ireland. For those of you who know the west coast of Ireland, it is very evocative, very revealing of the magical elements present in the land and in the sea. And there I was, on my own, in a little stone cottage with a fireplace and, God forbid, no one to talk to! Although there were books I found in the cottage, it did no good; within something like two days I was climbing the walls. I did not know what to do with myself. And the voice in my head kept saying, “Well, you can’t give up and go home now—what will other people think of you? What a wuss, to give up and go home now, just because you’re on your own!”

Thank God for that voice, from a larger reality, because I moved through a threshold. I started reading poetry—Yeats, of course. I sat by the peat fire that I made myself; the smoke…with the scent of peat in the air… There I met myself. I discovered what it was to be with myself, to just be. I didn’t want to go home at the end of seven days. I did not want to leave that place of total surrender to the life that was filling me, and the exploration that went along with that.

So I have no problem with solitude or silence. In fact, I often listen deeply in the silence—what more can I hear? What else is going on beyond the sound? You can feel the earth move, you can feel the grass grow, you can feel the rhythm and the pulse in all things.

Being present, I’m about joy and seriousness. I love expressing who I am and being able to come forth with that. I’m about the glory and the challenge in my living. And I’m about the pleasure and the fulfillment that bring magic in just such expression to my world.