The Trailblazers

The place that Sudra loved the most was the trail. She walked the trail alone. She walked the trail for everyone. She walked the trail with the deepest intimacy of everything that lives. She was living and breathing everything as she walked. She walked on all the beautiful trails of this wonderful Earth—her dearest devotee. The Earth so loved living in her unifying field of love. It whispered her name and felt her happiness as its own condition. The Earth was in love with the innocence of this woman's form and was waking up to dance as the Conscious brightness that It is—that all are. That's why Sudra walked and why she would always walk. It was a love affair of no compare.

You might have seen her coming around a mountain lake, or ambling through a forest, or wandering the sea's coast. She could have been young, or with a frosting of gray; wandering or walking deliberately with her camera slung over her left shoulder. Sudra did her best walking in her advanced age. She didn't ever see an end to her walking. She knew that her form, as innocent as ever and crippled with the decline of age, could and would march on even as her form needed to end—and it would end as she walked into the sun.

The sun—the warmth and fire for the Earth—the sun—the bright place of her light—her brightness which was a place deeper than the place of this place. The sun; the brightness; the domain where he shone himself, he was—is the blaze; she is the trail.

This is their story; the story of the adoration of Sudra for Blissy Be and her heart ceremony that dissolves the apparent separation of the other. This is the telling of Blissy Be coming before and bringing Sudra down to the here of now; of their work and play. They are the Trailblazers. This is the wandering of their tale. This is their sweet offering. Theirs is the path, the trail that all must walk to come to know themselves; to come to love, to be undone and warmed in the blaze of True Heart's fire.

He came first in the time of this place. She rested in a cocoon of soft warmth, full-petaled light. It was an exquisite location; a womb of sheer delight. He came to the ordinary in an ordinary way and crawled and got his knees dirty on his childhoods' home floors. He walked his first steps and spoke his first words among the encouragement of his family. He often swooned into the samadhi of his own state when left alone in his bed to sleep. And there he saw her and played with her. He would often encourage her and tease her to emerge from her flowering light cocoon to come to play here with him in this world where form was dense and shades of darker and darkest refused to know its own light source. Even back then, appearing as a very young one, he knew her, and he was clearing the trail for her to come. He would never force her. He made the way; the clearing space for her arrival. He told her of the lady sleepers and their yearning, of their ache to be enlivened and awakened by her. He always attracted and appealed to her with his great love, caring, and respect for her. “The form is being prepared. Come, my love,” he would whisper to her under his quilts.

His form grew and adapted to the ways of his culture. His love for her was kept in his right-hand pocket—there hidden and not seen by anyone. He took it upon himself to know the ordinariness of others, of how the darkness of “away from your self” lived them. He set his course to understand the suffering of the peoples of all this vast place. He blazed the trail through the waters of ego reflection to understand the suffering of all he met and would ever meet. The course was set, and he had to sail through the storms of “separate-only me apart” isolation. He had to understand the why and how of the pollution of ego I: the invention of the separate one apart—why it was the crux of all suffering. When he became like everyone, he understood the suffering of everyone. This was the first trail blazed.

She was born, also born among ordinary people. As a child she was happiest in the woods, wandering among wildflowers. From a big family, she found places in the neighborhood where she could wander off by herself and feel herself without all the thinking desires of her relatives. There by herself, she felt the delight of being. She took it for granted that everyone also felt this. As childhood years passed by quickly, she began to feel everyone's ego—suffering as her own, and thus this was her first trail blazed—she suffered away from herself—like all those she had come to live with. Her true freedom lived deep and dared not show itself in a world where women were bound to live out their existence and be allowed to survive by being dominated by male ego superiority. Happiness was to be found, and to be found was to be picked to serve an ego-I and its insane logic of being apart. To use women as sex objects was the objective of the male right in this place and time. She did not know of his true love for her at that time. She grew without knowing this love. She suffered what all women suffered. She was dominated by the cultural idioms of “you will be made happy by a man's ego needs and pleasure.” A woman is not free to be as she is—wild, unknown, passionate, a creative impulse of all-encompassing love. The heart could not be open here—be unpredictable in its wild play to heart ecstasy. She suffered the loss of her dignity to be Herself. She was played upon, not played with. The power of herself was lost—hidden and buried seemingly away from her own impulse so it could be used and yet denied its actuality by a male-ego-I-superiority culture. She had to begin the great walk—to take her bold, deliberate steps—to learn herself the way to her own empowerment. This is the trail she began to blaze. The force of her impulse to walk this great way was her shakti.