Bigger Than The Sky
Praise for Bigger Than The Sky
What a lovely, refreshing, honest expression of non-duality! With humility and compassion, Vicki speaks to the Knowing in all of us, reminding us of the possibility of finding grace and gratitude in even the darkest parts of our lives. A delightful and moving book of love and loss, seeking and discovery, pain and surrender. Highly recommended!
Jeff Foster, author of The Deepest Acceptance and Falling in Love With Where You Are.
I thought I was done with books, but this one is free of the spiritual ego that taints so much writing. It is refreshing, with an intimacy that is seamless and honest.
John Troy, author of Wisdom’s Soft Whisper
This is a really powerful book; a delicate and artful balance between transcendence and humanity. I love the way it flows… connected by a thematic thread yet non-linear. I am finding it an inspirational and very fluid read.
Reading this book is like sitting under a waterfall; Vicki’s words wash over you in a most purifying and heart-opening way.
David Newman, author of The Timebound Traveler
For her newest book Bigger than the Sky, Vicki Woodyard has selected the perfect title. Unlike so many books on offer today that only present the author’s own expression of what they consider the truth, this one moves between two similar but somewhat different points of understanding, giving the reader a view of a VERY BIG SKY indeed. As we move between Vicki’s words and the words of her friend Peter, limiting beliefs of what one thought was true can dissolve. I highly recommend this book for anyone ready to stop thinking “I already know” to experiencing something far bigger.
Mary Margaret Moore, author of I Come As A Brother: The Teachings of Bartholomew
This book is an ongoing “steady gaze into what is,” as Vicki points out in her characteristically human way. Vicki has a rare gift in being able to take spiritual awakening out of its esoteric sheath and bring it into the everyday heart of human life, with all its ups, downs, beauty and ugliness. Having been diagnosed and then freed of cancer, I found her essays about her husband Bob’s cancer so poignant and right on target. Everything in life is a gift, even death and cancer, as this book points out. As Vicki writes, we come to see the living experience of ourselves, no adjectives needed. Enjoy these little essay gems!
Scott Kiloby, author of Living Relationship: Finding Harmony With Others
Bigger Than The Sky
A Radical Awakening
Vicki Woodyard
Non-Duality Press
BIGGER THAN THE SKY
©2014 Vicki Woodyard
©2014 Non-Duality Press
Vicki Woodyard has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher.
Non-Duality Press | PO Box 2228 | Salisbury | SP2 2GZ
United Kingdom
ISBN: 978-1-908664-45-7
www.non-dualitypress.org
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Note to the Reader
Peter
How It Began
Where Do I Stand?
Who Are We Then?
A Conversation with Peter
Bare
Life Is a Ballet
The Great Physician
Love Between the Lines
My Place in the Inner World
An Invitation to Rest
Bigger than the Sky
Losing Interest in your Story
The Wind on Your Skin
An Awakened Man
Faltering Steps
A Message to Peter
Nothing to Cling to
Breaking
ICU
Peter and the Cat
Peter’s Birthday
This, Too, Shall Pass
Who Is the True Guru?
Peace Descends
Grace
Remembering Myself
A Grateful Amen
Hard Times
The Great Silence
Ho Ho!
The Blessedness of Letting Go
No One Ever Goes Away
God Has a Sense of Humor
A Wide Wildness
A Quiet Vibrancy
Consolation from Peter
Temporary Good News
Ease
Downhill Fast
The Show Must Go On
A Diamond Tear
Dreams of Love
Dwindling Down to Nothing
A Jeweled Net of Grace
Self-Kindness
Going With the Flow
Only Peace Lies Ahead
You Are What Bob Is
Keeping Busy
No Time or Space
A Gentle Simplicity
An Awake Heart
The Nub of a Wing
The Other Side—A Meditation
You Are the Self
The Illusion of Time
The Ultimate Luxury
The Core of the Heart
Touched by the Hand of Sorrow
The Hermit Leaves the Hut: A Little Story about Wholeness
The Everyday Entrance to Eternity
The Last Message
FOREWORD
Vicki Woodyard’s writing is about reality. She reveals the place beyond pain and suffering by being factual and direct, by looking straight at suffering. The magic of her writing is directness, humor, and artistry exacting a sweetness that transcends suffering.
How does Vicki achieve this? In this book it is by way of a literary relationship with Peter. Now Peter’s a whole other influence in my life. I didn’t know Peter personally, but his website, sentient.org, inspired me to start nonduality.com.
Sentient.org was dedicated to Ramana Maharshi and consisted of a collection of writings from enlightened sages living and deceased. So here’s what we have in this book. Two people facing every shape and shadow of sorrow. Two people seeing through sorrow, seeing what is real. Peter and Vicki emerge as a pair for the ages. We join them because we all know pain. We are Vicki. And Peter. And Laurie, Bob, Bessie, Vernon Howard, and three cats and a pup that gets put down too. Oy. At some point you have to laugh at it all. You have to see what really matters. Peter and Vicki do. I did. You will.
That’s what this book is: community. Like the old Nonduality Salon, it’s a community in which you’re not safe. Sorry about that. You have to face pain and sorrow. There’s nothing to protect you here. How else to realize what Vicki confesses: “In one sense, sorrow is the true guru, and when it burns away the dross of the self, only holy ash remains.”
Jerry Katz
FOR PETER
I will meet you out beyond the breaking
but how will I know you?
For you have disappeared into your life
and come out no one, ho ho.
Perhaps a memory of you
will light the blueness of the sky
and I will recognize the taste of
conversation we once had and
then we disappeared into the fire.
Note to the Reader
The essays that make up this book are not in strict chronological order. They are more in kyros (God’s) time than chronos (clock and calendar) time. What I hope is clear is how Peter and I flowed
together through a dark tunnel of time. As a result, this book was written.
Some of these essays appeared in Life With A Hole In It: That’s How The Light Gets In.
Vicki Woodyard
Peter
In a time of overwhelm, a man named Peter befriended me online. He had founded sentient.org, one of the earliest spiritual sites. He never gave his last name or where he lived. The facts about Peter are few; he preferred it that way.
Little did I know that Peter’s words, so simple at the time, would continue to bear fruit for me and others. I do not know when Peter died. He just grew weaker and less able to compose emails to me and his other friends.
Now his light emanates from these pages. Welcome to the story of Peter and me.
How It Began
You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.
Pema Chodron
When my husband was dying, I began an email correspondence with a man named Peter who was ill from a series of strokes. He could barely get around and yet he told me he was “bigger than the sky.” After his strokes, he found that the old pile of adjectives around him did him no good. “I am a good-looking man, a man’s man,” he told me once. And yet he found himself unable to walk down the hall to the bathroom for two years running. The new adjectives people were using were not particularly helpful. Strings of words like “poor prognosis, stroke victim, unable to work” were now applied to him.
Peter was barely holding onto life and my husband was dying. Neither Peter nor I had time to waste on concepts. Although we had both been on the Way for a long time, now we jettisoned any deep thoughts in exchange for the chance to hang out in the rarefied air of simplicity.
Peter had been to spiritual teachers and found them to be useless. “They could not help me,” he said. “They simply did not know how.” So he did the only thing he was able to do. He sat in the sunshine with a little cat named Alex on his chest. The cat’s purrs, in lieu of a nursing staff, conveyed to him the healing power of nature. He watched the robins run across the grass because they were what he saw. He was grateful in the most basic way. And he began to realize that what he had found was the living experience of himself. No adjectives need apply.
And so I sat in my leather recliner in perfectly good health, and remembered that I too was not who I thought or felt I was. I simply was.
By the end of the morning I had a wastebasket full of words that seemed to describe me. I was bigger than any of them. I knew what Peter knew—that I was bigger than the sky. I was bigger than anything that could be named or described. Peter is no longer among us and yet he lives within all who loved him. How does he do this? I was never sure how Peter did anything but feel the joy of the moment. “When I am in pain, I yell. And when I fall down, I say ‘ho ho’.” But he never latched onto anything. His own sense of I am became stronger than any stroke could ever be.
Once he had a brilliant career and then, after the strokes, he had almost no memory of who he was or who his friends were. He couldn’t make change. But he sure made a difference. You see, the I am that we all are is indestructible. It is too bad we don’t learn this unless we are reduced to helplessness. In Peter’s case, he saw through the illusion of having a separate self. He realized that no matter where he found himself, he was bigger. And that brought him joy that few of us will ever know.
We were both living the bare bones of a life. His physical capabilities limited by a series of strokes, he managed to leave me with a record of reality that survives only on love. Putting dogma aside, he reveled in the simplicity of each breath, each faltering step.
If I had to sum up what Peter meant to me, I would say that he offered me himself. And that was so powerful as to render me ripped open. The inner became the outer and vice versa. He treated me to stories of his cats; and I, in return, swapped tales of how it felt to be in charge of someone who was dying. You’d think these exchanges would have been sad, but they weren’t. They were fashioned of something as fine as the ether, as indescribable as air and as necessary.
“For what it’s worth, I hold your hand in this,” he said, and every time I read the words of my gentle friend, his far-reaching wisdom, sprinkled with laughter, carries me back home to the heart.
When I take a walk around my neighborhood, I often see the robins running across the grass. My heart opens to the understanding that Peter gave me. I am bigger than anything I see. I am bigger than the sky.
Where Do I Stand?
One of the absolute qualifications for a writer is not knowing his arse from his elbow.
Leonard Cohen
My editor asked me: What do you mean by spirit, what do you mean by soul?
I replied with a quote:
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking. ~ Rumi
Our questions should be carried for a lifetime. We should live them carefully, as if God Himself were listening.
Writers, and poets in particular, know how to encode these questions in order to help them live. For example, this whole book is about soul, or spirit. For Peter realized that his very nature was love. For me, awareness and love are one and the same thing.
I listened to Peter as he spoke to me from in-between the lines. When he described himself as being bigger than the sky, that was not to be taken literally. It was a soul knowing that he shared with many people. I was not the only one that benefited from his awakening.
If my writing does anything, it opens the reader to a softer place than words can reach. I use words to go beyond words. But doesn’t every good writer do that? I hope so.
As far as my speaking to Bob as if he were alive and he could hear me, who can disprove that? It is the natural human response to loss. After someone dies, we carry that love to a higher level and there we plant it for higher purposes. What grows is the eternal side of love. Yes, there are tears involved. They soften the ground for that flower of love to be planted. And so we gather courage to go on without their physical presence. Peter is no longer on this earth, but his spirit is hanging around…
Who Are We Then?
I sat watching the body of my daughter lying in the small coffin.
It wasn’t her.
I lay awake at night mourning.
It wasn’t me.
My son turned inward.
It wasn’t him.
My husband fell silent.
It wasn’t him.
Who was it?
I sat and wrote about my daughter.
It wasn’t me.
My husband became a workaholic.
It wasn’t him.
Our son grew distant.
It wasn’t him.
My husband grew ill.
It wasn’t him.
I was angry.
It wasn’t me.
I sat watching the body of my husband lying in his coffin.
It wasn’t him.
My son and I were strong for each other.
It wasn’t us.
Who are we when the chips are down and the shit has hit the proverbial fan?
It isn’t us.
Who are we when, like angels, we soar into the impossible with great dignity? It isn’t us.
Who are we when, like mighty fortresses, we stand against the darkness?
It isn’t us.
Who am I? Who are we when we love and fail to feel anything but devastation?
Who are we when we numb out and retreat into the fortress of the mind.
Who rolls away the stone of grief and says, “Come out, the light will no longer be denied.”
Who are we then? Who are we?
A Conversation with Peter
Most of the time I just try to rest and play with my gentle little cat in the sunlight. Nothing else is important.
Peter
The things that Peter said carried great resonance for me and, with his permission, I am sharing some of our dialogue below.
Peter: This life of ours is so short—an eye blink and it is gone. I think it is very lovely that you and your husband could hold hands together even while walking through hell. Who knows what may come? In joy or in suffering, this amazing life dazzles us all.
Vicki: You sound as if you might be ill yourself.
Peter: That’s what my doctors say. I don’t believe them. My little cat never gives tomorrow or yesterday a thought. Sometimes she hurts and asks for comfort. Sometimes she is tired and lies gently in the warm sun smiling up at me. What more could there be? No wonder Ramana Maharshi loved Lakshmi (his favorite cow) so very much. Lakshmi and my little cat are not going anywhere. They never have. How blessed.
Rest is greatly undervalued. It seems to me that most people in this society have not had genuine rest since they were young children. No wonder there is such unhappiness. I feel that most of the folks sitting in satsangs are really just looking for a little rest. Animals are so much smarter. They rest when they are tired. Now there’s a sensible life!
It is my own experience that pain is something of an eye-opener. Pain that goes on for years tends to drown out the silliness of belief systems in favor of direct contact with life, God, or whatever one wishes to call truth.
Intermediaries are a waste of time when the body is crumbling. I have found that such difficulties tend to make all other sounds meaningless. Only the beating of one’s own true heart has meaning.
Vicki: Right after Bob was diagnosed, I wrote to Pamela Wilson; I clung to these words of hers in my sadness and uncertainty. “Rest and rapture, what else is there?” she said.
Peter: The person that Pamela says was her teacher (Robert Adams) took a long, slow time in dying of Parkinson’s disease. I met him about a year before the end. He could barely speak and shook constantly, but his inner peace and beauty shone like a beacon. Even in the middle of a failing body he rested deeply within himself. Very lovely.
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