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In Corrogue today is my birthday. I have been graced to live in human form on this extraordinary planet for nearly fifty-six years in calendar time. I say nearly, because in some respects I am always behind the times. This is because my twin brother and I were born three months premature. When Jeff and I were born we each weighed a little more than a bag of sugar. Neither of us was expected to live and our wonderful woman doctor, Dr. Bell, who was a real friend to my mother said, “Edna, don’t get too attached to them.” Except that no one asked my grandmother about it. This was Sarah Jane Dobbin, a farmer’s daughter. She decided to get more than attached. She put us in a Moses basket. Then she nailed a thermometer to the wall. She stoked up the peat fire and then for the next three months never let the temperature drop below 21C. She drew up a rota between her five daughters and we twins were fed milk and brandy on each hour. We survived to be called ‘the miracle twins from Milford.’ Milford is a village two miles outside of Armagh City in Northern Ireland. Armagh takes its name from the goddess Macha who also gave birth to twins when compelled to run a race against her will and as a consequence laid a curse on all the men of Ulster above fighting age unto nine generations.. I have always, as a consequence, loved fire. I am what my friends call a ‘fire hugger’ (and sometimes the fire hogger). Fire kept me alive in this world of form. More than this, the fire of love that burned within my Grandmother’s heart kept both of us alive. For this I am deeply grateful. For this I am heartily thankful. So to celebrate, tomorrow night I will have some friends around. We will have what we call in Ireland a night’s Craic (pronounced crack.) This is a form of social drug that revolves around talking and drinking. This is not a Class A drug. Friends from America often find it amusing when people ask them, “ Have you had some great Craic?” This year I am coming to the end of a seven-year cycle. This will be the seventh year in a cycle of seven. This last year I imagine as a transition year. It is a threshold in time between the old and the new. It is a time when there is the opportunity for letting go and letting be. This for me is a time of real excitement and real opportunity. Over the last cycle of seven years there was much change. Metaphorically speaking I took a flying leap and returned to Ireland from England, where I lived for thirty years. My partner Bee and I returned with no job, no house and only the vision that we would in some way make a difference. This return was as a consequence of the death of my beloved sister Eleanor Mary Daniel from cancer. Her death was a catalyst. It has been an astounding gift to me in ways that I could never have known had I not gone to the edge, been pushed, and found I could fly. That is why this ezine is dedicated to her memory. At this threshold place of seven years I feel as
if I am metaphorically pregnant with creative potential. What
is new in my life is the art of storytelling. I am falling in
love with this storytelling. I want to share a quote about the
power of story that I endorse 100%. My story is not as important as the real story. The real story is the one about making manifest the experience of love in action. This is the birth of higher consciousness. This is the real gift that life gives to each and every sentient being that is born into form. The story of my life is important only to the collective life and the real life. ‘Little me’ lives in form between birth and death. It thinks it lives within a body bounded by time and space. It avoids any consideration of the real cycle of life, which includes death. This is the cycle of life in form, the dissolution of life in form and the rebirth of life in form. Life itself is not dying. It is simply an arising from the unmanifested to the manifested. You are this life that is forever rising. Only you think (and we collectively agreed as human beings) that we are separate from life. We identify solely with the body and we live isolated lives from the knowing of our true source. This is the birthless/deathless arising of Love. To be born as a human being is the greatest opportunity. It is the opportunity to consciously know that you are life everlasting. It is the opportunity to know that you are the play of the Universe that is forever creating from the energy of unconditional love. This is not a dream. This is not a flight of philosophical imagination. This is a knowing. You can be this knowing. You can eat of the Tree of Knowing – not the Tree of Knowledge. This is the real banquet. This experience of knowing was familiar to the Celtic people. They knew how to go to the land of Tir na Nog, the land of forever young. They knew that you stay forever young when you know the experience of presence. This is the presence that is the essential you and that is not born and does not die. All else that you identify with keeps you locked into the prison of time. It keeps you asleep in the idea that you are somebody important. You are only important as the play of God, the dance of the Beloved, the flow of Creation. You are the flow of creation and when you allowing enough you will know that this is the real game of life. You, as the energy of love, have come to play in the world of form. So ‘I am’ is arisen in human form. This arising of ‘I am’ is the gift of birth given to each of us. ‘I am’ is the play of love in the world of form for its own delight. You are the delight of ‘ I am.’ The word human is rooted in two words. ‘Hu’ means “the sound of God.” ‘Man’ represents form. You are the sound of God in form. This sound, this vibration, is the energy of love. It was never created and cannot be un-created. This sound is the unique song that plays through you and can only be played through you. All the mystics tell us that this sound is who we really are. In the beginning was sound. Only there was no beginning. Beginnings presuppose endings. You are the one who has no beginning or end. You can know this but you have to be born into a human body in order to know. This is the real gift and the real opportunity of birth. In that human body your real work, to quote Eckhart Tolle, is “to die before you die.” To quote Jesus, “you must be born again.” This does not mean you have to become a Christian. It means you enter the experience of the timeless as a conscious being in human form. It means you come to be the knowing of love. This is real cause for celebration. This is real Craic. So tonight on the 56th anniversary of my entry into this amazing opportunity of learning to be love in form I am off to celebrate this gift of life. This is the gift given to me by the Beloved, my mother, my father, and my blessed Grandmother. Let each day of your life in form be a celebration of your being in form so that out of this you can know the real life beyond form. Then you will know the Blessing is already here and you are it.
Tony Cuckson is a storyteller, writer, workshop leader and Anam cara (Soul Friend) .
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