"Paradise on my right. Hell on my left, and the Angel of Death behind"

I have claimed, in a previous post that hate is just love with its back turned.

People whose inspiration I value greatly have said, in one or another way, that it's all about love.

And so it is. But the definition of the word Love that they're using ranges widely from the commonly held usage.

Love is the Ground of All Being, the Zero Point of the Universe whence all matter and spirit is bound. It's evidenced in Nongoma as well as in Palestine. On the fire-illumined streets of Athens and in Papua . Love does not imply pacifism.

The field is felt when we, stirring awake after half a lifetime of somnolence, engage our whole beings into life, grasping each experience eagerly, ecstatic and painful alike, with senses sensitised exquisitely to the nuances of this nondual cosmos.

I've come around the sun 49 times, now - seven sevens, and I'm a seven twice over myself, by birthdate and birth name. Reviewing the plot so far is joyous in the extreme, painful to the bone, and all, by now, informed by that backing, supporting field of Love within which we each live, and breath, and have our being.

It's like flowing along the edge of the blade. Not so much a balance as a holding-in-tension, an alert awareness that every atomic movement brings both pleasure and agony, and that both are Joy.

Witches, and their cut-rate antecedents, Shamans (well, a Witch can walk into a supermarket and buy a bottle of Coke - a Shaman has to think twice ) should know all about this. It's the state of liminality in which we discover, sometimes to our great surprise, that energies and meaning are at their most poignant at the boundary between two apparent extremes. And that, yes, they are merely reflections of each other.

As are we all.

Pic: Terrence McKenna, by the inimitable Alex Grey