what's it like coming out of retreat after all this time?

Everything is big. Cities are big, highways are big—and emotions? They blow through like a category four typhoon.

Everyone looks like angels to me.

No, that's not quite it. They are angels, always have been, and their angel-ness is revealed to my eyes as I walk around Vancouver at sunset.

Dogs, too. Children, of course.

It's beauty, beauty, beauty. But also the contemporaneous tragedy that they don't know their beauty. Watching faces: worried, sad, distracted; not knowing the nature of their goodness.

How do we get so caught in the passing clouds of thoughts, moods, expectations—how do we miss the reverent sunshine that we are?

Me too. Of course I do.

After all this meditation, thousands of hours of listening into the heart of things, still I miss the mark again. And then again.

I do wish I was kinder. More patient.

If meditation does anything, it shows me where I'm still caught. Still prickly, or hardened, or a little dim.

And yet, I can see the secret beauty in everyone I love, and in everyone I've never met.

I come back to this, even as the world spins, even as it burns.

I don't know that everything will be ok. I don't know that it's ok even now.

But I know this sweetness is what we are made of.

lots of love,
nico

p.s. tomorrow (Saturday) I'm teaching an online daylong on Awakening Energy. You can sign up last minute, if you like.