Zero Point

I stand in a cornfield that curves and cascades and yawns for miles, surrounded by oaks and aspens murmuring in a cacophony of whispers. The sun dazzles golden against a true-blue Indiana sky. My gingham dress floats. I see myself in the scene, and take a snapshot with my mind’s eye.

I know this is an image I have chosen in the new world I’m creating. A 3D impressionist painting of perfection that I dreamed into existence. I relax, seeing the outer reflection of the inner vision.

I have finally surrendered to what I have always known was my call: to enter a cosmic flow of aliveness where the full spectrum of my light can come online to play and love and architect reality. A seismic shift, tangible but ineffable. In order to experience this new existence I had to first drop what I was before. Let me explain:  

1.5 weeks prior

(Though somehow time and space have collapsed, and the world is appearing more as snapshots).

The words are a tangle and won’t come out. I try with hero’s might to crawl to my third act turning point, ascend the climax, and ease into resolution, but the core of me resists. A deep, low-level resistance for the past few years, more correctly, my entire life.

I’m writing my latest script, The Watcher’s Game, but I can’t move. We could easily call it writer’s block, but this is something else entirely…the most profound but subtle call. So easy to ignore….

Yet today, I am finally heeding its siren song.

And so I stop.

And I put it all down.

For that is what is being called for.

I sit, perfectly still, and watch the mood ring of Lake Michigan reflect the mercurial emotions of the sky. This summer in Chicago has been a perpetually shifting storm.

For a few years now I’ve wondered: why the subterranean ennui? The lack of passion? The very thing I’ve most identified with—inspiration, art, expression—semi-dormant with a thick soil of apathy atop. I didn’t know how fertile that soil was, and from it what would spring. An entirely new dimension, an entirely new me.

I noticed today that beneath the low-buzz of apathy something has been silently screaming for attention. The inner necessity for a full halt of the trajectory that’s been running on autopilot my entire life—a flock of scattered images obscuring the core light of me. I now stop and put down identity-seeking through actions in a way that has enslaved me to something I am not. Something that is, of course, very familiar to me, yet is an amalgam that includes many falsities, unworked out ancestral wounds, and deeply entrained entanglements with a societal system that I actually don’t subscribe to. Because this option exists, has always existed. Because this is the only true option. Everything else I’ve been up to is pattern.

I’ve been ignoring this vibrant call to instead feed a hungry ghost. I’ve been trying to prove myself to a dying world and so, naturally, that would make me feel dead. (My art must be good or deemed so by others or else I don’t deserve to live! Why am I here if I’m not creating great work?!)–yeah that absurdity is a core narrative that’s been adding coal to the slow burn of this identity-locked life.

I stop and I dive into the silent, alive space within. The bedrock from which truly spontaneous action can spring. I can discover what truly wants to spring, what truly wants to be expressed when I’m not expressing from issues—to secure worth and value, to get my needs met. What actions cascade in the river of aliveness?

It feels very strange and impossible in its simplicity. The portal of now where past, present, and future disappear. Like the way the sun rips a white hole in the sky and if you really look you will really see it is the entry way to this dimension.

I haven’t wanted to fully let go into what been happening to me this past year, because I don’t fully understand it. Like a caterpillar that turns to mush before alighting its wings upon the wind, I didn’t want to liquify completely. So I held to a thread, to the central program running through the mainframe: ‘I am an artist, I am a filmmaker, I must succeed, I must create something profound. I must strive.’ And with that, its counterpoint is naturally present too: ‘I am not good enough, I have failed, I have no intrinsic value.’

I mean, nothing too wrong with that, if I’m living in the old world and don’t want to open up to the luminous perfection of my multidimensional self. And I’m compelled to add, this mainframe program is replaceable and has been replaced many times. It used to be tied into piousness and philanthropy, and then was tied to physical attractiveness or lack thereof, but the core thread is about seeking identity, seeking worth, seeking to be valued.

Again, nothing wrong with that—just a pattern, an ancestral program, but the issue here is not moral. The issue is about putting it down and stopping. Stopping and being who I have always been. Liquifying the caterpillar of my old identities to open into my multidimensional self, interconnected with everything. This was the blueprint for my life all along. It was always here (I was always here, how do I say?), but somehow I had to ripen into it.

Even the words I now write, they can either be living or dead. I feel the difference when I surrender to what’s actually happening. This cosmic miracle transpiring before me and through me. Me becoming Me in the new World that I’m creating. Instead of me trying to appease a dead world that was never mine. Trying to fit my life force into a ring box to give to a lover that would leave me at the altar anyway.

It does not mean I will not create in a similar fashion, using cinema as a portrait of this profound aliveness. But it means I must first start by stopping completely.

This is what I knew I must do. I must stop, totally stop, in a certain type of way. Stop the belief in everything that is not real, that is not aligned with this ever-present becoming that is finally finding its footing in the material world. Stop trying to prove myself through this one very limited channel of identity: the Artist, who must be lauded or is worthless. I literally and figuratively put myself on an altar in a scene in my first weirdo feature film, but the irony was lost and maybe that’s because I was too.   

The harbinger for this profound stopping and opening was the pressure. Taut under the surface. I finally turned my attention to an unusual space, a space so obvious, yet so subtle and omnipresent, it’s easy to miss. The yearning is tricky—the desire to stop? It’s the antithesis of the whole damn trajectory of our worn-in identities. But when I shed the cheap cloak of this false self that believes it’s so deficient and flawed, I enter into a sun-like portal of now, where I am my true, very-alive existence. Like spiraling upwards to a new dimension that always existed adjacent to the first. We can all feel it, yet we skirt around it constantly. But you can’t skirt around this and actually get what it is. You must stop and dive in.

What will be revealed there, well, I shall see, but the first thing I’m noticing is that I feel free. I feel alive. There’s a richness I’ve been missing. The burden of space and time is gone, the pressure and sense of obligation to create in order to establish identity and worth is gone. Yet, creation and creativity are very much here. In a way that I’ve longed to feel yet haven’t felt in so long.  

1.5 Weeks Later 

Back to my cornfield, but not just any cornfield. A cornfield of infinite possibilities.

It was strange at first because it was like the stopping had to take hold and nothing new arose. There was a pause and stillness. I met with a familiar other and found my patterns reemerging, trying to reestablish the familiar, wounded identity. I recognized what was happening and entered back into the core aliveness of my true being.

And then I felt the first true impulse that I knew I must follow. This impulse takes me in a direction away from the identity seeking I’ve been up to, but it is arising from the heart vortex and I can’t deny it. The impulse takes me in a direction that is of love and taking care of someone in need. It’s an impulse I would have resisted and possibly missed altogether before, when I was too busy with my agenda of establishing identity in a dying world. While it doesn’t feed my old identity, when I follow it I feel truly alive in a strikingly new way.

From this surrender, the snapshots of my dream of reality are of love reflecting the love that is being birthed in a synchronous flow of life unfolding. A step in a continual unfoldment of what I’m becoming, of my multi-dimensional self finding its footing in the new world. An alive river of consciousness. I am in it, and I am it.

Like today after the cornfield.

At the beach there was a woman, Eva, from Prague, who plopped herself down in the shade next to our group of friends at the base of a tall dune that I saw in a dream long before I’d ever been there. She was a vision in her neon yellow swimsuit and 80’s butt-rock sunglasses.

I went to her to offer a piece of Honey Mamma chocolate. We got to chatting and she spoke of her boyfriend who treats her so well, buying her massages and clothes. She describes:

“All the other men I’ve dated before have been garbage, my husband of 17 years was an alcoholic. But two years ago there was a homeless man, Simon, who I took into my home and he is still living with me. Since I did that my whole life changed, everywhere I go, it is love, like you guys today, so kind, and it is all the time, everywhere around me beauty and love, and I am in shock. Every day I just say thank you God, thank you God.”

And so in this new dream that I’m dreaming straight from the source of aliveness, neon Eva, who’s living from the heart vortex and being reflected back love continually, shows up to reflect back my own moment of surrender.

And together, silently, we basked in an entirely new reality.

Somehow I always had a vision of this, inner instructions for when this moment arose, the instructions were not computable before this moment of the shift, and they are unfolding in real time. It is so completely and utterly astounding. I am now spontaneously off to Arizona, to follow the impulse and serve in a new way, we’ll see how it unfolds from there. But one thing I know:

I am alive.

Self Portrait by Maria Allred