Four questions I'd like to be asked.

One. 

What touches you? To answer this question you need to be aware of what really does touch you, and if this is the case, your self-awareness is taking you towards self-knowledge. If you can quickly list more than five things that touch you, you know your feelings quite well. If you battle to find the first one, you should spend more time in your heart. 

Two. 

What do you fear the most and when did you first begin to experience this fear? To answer this one, you would go back to pre-consciousness, as an infant, a newly-born, perhaps even a neonate.We tend to think that language describes reality. It is more the case that the sense of reality and perceptual formation work together from pre-conceptual and pre-conscious experience through the whole of life, giving us an amazing power of perception, if we freed ourselves enough to use it. 

Three. 

What do you choose to feed your soul? Choosing to feed your soul deliberately gives you the insight to know that your emotional reality is entirely up to you. Your focus is your soul-food. Snakes use this to get their literal food. 

Four.

How has love imprisoned you? If you can make sense of this question, you should notice that your most profound and urgent feelings are capable of trapping you rather than setting free your vast capacity for constructive creativity. 

Your name, your date of birth, your profession, your favourite colours, your preferred food are easy details: try a few penetrating questions to get to the interesting stories. 

Covid-19, the end, and what I'd say.

Our stories of what's happening are what we believe . I've taken some moments to consider what might be said about what's happening in the world at this time. Most of what's going around is stupefying rather than clarifying, and there are some things that we could learn. The first that comes to mind is that what's gripped human imagination is the fact and fear of mortality.

The stats that produce fear are what they are, and there are plenty of other stats, too. In Peter Porter's poem "Your Attention Please" the somber words "Some of us may die. Remember, statistically it is not likely to be you" come to mind. But I think that what's driven the realisation of this pandemic is that you and I could well be dead quite soon. Politicians want a nice, quiet, obedient crowd of voters, and if they don't do something to allay fears, they won't be seen to be leaders. So act they must.

But in my view, what we call leadership produces nothing but followers. And in following we become nothing.

Doing what we are enforced to do, believing the stories that we're supplied, accepting rhetoric that's designed to make us accepting, we walk into the nothing of ourselves, and thus, when I regard the end of what we've accepted util now, the end of capitalism as it's been driven by forces no longer sustainable, the end of shallow communication, the end, I hope, of hollow values disguised as democracy and practised as political will, all I can really do is regard the end my this, my own organism, and ask as dispassionately as I can what it's aliveness has been for.

Let's assume I'm going to die in six weeks. Reaching as far as I can into soul-speak, what would I say?

I'd say:

Choose your stories as consciously as possible. Go back to the oceans that allowed you to build, launch, navigate and berth your boat. No one has to be trapped by the trappings of leadership. Learn to hear what your voice says by engaging in clarifying conversations rather than vehement creeds. Learn to hear hearts as well as words, and don't assume for one moment that the heart is full of love and light. It's more holographic than moral, and encompasses the entire spectrum of turbulence and connections made possible by the table of elements. So I'd say get to grips with your own heart, allow it to express what it desires most to utter. That way you make your self vulnerable to your mind, and can act more wisely and decisively in respect of your more informed choices. At worst, we're a bundle of competing instincts, at best a conscious narrator of aspiration. And beware of premature statements of triumph as the journey unfolds.

I'd encourage the conversations, those stories that release the living energy that's specific to you. These are what create the newness that's upon us. What feels like the end is obviously never the end. Somehow there's always a narrator who observes, and turns the chaos into a craft. 

Love is a verb

Many problems are linguistic rather than real. The idea of love is a good example. In English "love" is an abstract noun: "I am looking for love" as well as a verb: "I love pasta".

Let's get rid of the noun. If you're looking for love, you'll never find it. It doesn't exist as a thing, or as a state of mind, or emotionality, or spirituality, or anything like that. Or even an understanding, or a contract of affection. If you're looking to analyse, seek, define or otherwise nail love down, I say it's not going to work.

You do it.

We talk of making love as in sexual or erotic communication, and that's fair enough. Good physical feelings shared are good to do. But to achieve that you have to do something. Staring into your lover's eyes tend to go to the next level of action.

Love isn't something you tap into. It's more like something you intend, create, achieve, activate, enact, inspire, work, design.

You do it.

The motivation is relevant. Whether indifferent, compassionate, caring or efficient, if it fulfils the need that's there, it's what has driven the action. When my plastic surgeon is paying careful attention to the BCC on my forehead, having removed, replaced and sews the skin, and I notice his totally focused eyes as he darts those really fine stitches, is he thinking ching-ching, his supper, his cycling or does he simply love what he's doing? And is he really thinking about me at all?

I don't know, but the need is fulfilled.

So I sense that if you pay careful attention to what's needed, required and relevant to solve an emotional, spiritual and otherwise real problem, you're doing love. So long as you do it. I have killed a few animals on purpose, to cancel unnecessary suffering. So you understand what I mean.

To do love is not easy. This requires discernment, discipline, courage, conviction, honesty, truthfulness, clarity, conviction, and at the end of the list, action.

So if someone can tell me what that feels like, for them, that would be a story worth attention.