Half a lifetime ago I was on a 15 day Buddhist retreat and during that retreat I had a deep personal insight into my own being. Without going into the detail I realised that at my core and the core of every other being is what I can only describe as a seed or kernel of love. It’s so difficult to write of these experiences as they are ineffable so that phrase will have to do.

So skip forward 25 years and I encounter the Druid spiritual pathway and find myself drawn to the idea of nature based spirituality. That was 13 years ago and since that time I have developed my practise within that tradition. At first by grounding myself in nature and subsequently starting to really realise that I am nature itself. Now it’s very easy to intellectualise this but what I am writing about is a much deeper knowing. Regular readers of this blog will know that nakedness is very much part of how I connect with the web of life and in the early summer I was filming a piece for a group that I am part of and suddenly it hit me that

“if”

I am part of nature and at my core there is what I call this kernel of love then it cannot be other than that nature it’s self can only be a manifestation of that love.

This is the video that was featured in the Scottish Pagan Federation’s online conference in September.

Now I know that the way I am describing things is very close to the Christian doctrine but I believe that humans have always tried to answer the spiritual questions in life and the various religions all spring from the same longing but have subsequently codified the experience. I do not choose to codify what I believe I work in a much more visceral way.

A couple of posts ago I wrote a piece which I called the “Web of Life” in which I again had a very profound experience of actually seeing and realising that I and everything else is an integral part of that web.

Last weekend I had the joy of spending a couple of days with a group on a mini retreat in the wonderful Kilmartin Glen and sharing in individual’s difficulties and suffering and what came through me was a sense of love and caring. If at the core everything is love when you look or experience anything what you are looking at is love manifesting in front of you, and you yourself are a manifestation of that love.

What prompted me to write this was another blog that I read today in which the words of William Blake were quoted:

“if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite” 

This is what I think has recently happened, the events of my life and the past few months have opened wide the doors of my perception.

So the next time that you see something you feel is ugly or you find yourself being critical just look a little deeper and maybe see through to that little kernel of love that is in all.