Bigger Than the Sky Sample

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Bigger Than The Sky


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Praise for Bigger Than The Sky

What a lovely, refreshing, honest expression of non-duality! With humility and compassion, Vicki speaksto the Knowing in all of us, reminding us of thepossibility of finding grace and gratitude in even thedarkest parts of our lives. A delightful and moving

book of love and loss, seeking and discovery, pain andsurrender. 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 isfree of the spiritual ego that taints so much writing.It is refreshing, with an intimacy that is seamlessand honest.

John Troy, author of Wisdoms Soft Whisper

This is a really powerful book; a delicate and artfulbalance between transcendence and humanity. I lovethe way it flows connected by a thematic thread yetnon-linear. I am finding it an inspirational and veryfluid read.

Reading this book is like sitting under a waterfall;

Vickis words wash over you in a most purifying andheart-opening way.

David Newman, author of The Timebound Traveler


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For her newest book Bigger than the Sky, Vicki Wood-yard has selected the perfect title. Unlike so many

books on offer today that only present the authorsown expression of what they consider the truth, thisone moves between two similar but somewhat differ-ent points of understanding, giving the reader a viewof a VERY BIG SKY indeed. As we move betweenVickis words and the words of her friend Peter, limit-

ing beliefs of what one thought was true can dissolve. Ihighly recommend this book for anyone ready to stopthinking I already know to experiencing somethingfar 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, asVicki points out in her characteristically human way.Vicki has a rare gift in being able to take spiritualawakening out of its esoteric sheath and bring it intothe everyday heart of human life, with all its ups,downs, beauty and ugliness. Having been diagnosedand then freed of cancer, I found her essays about herhusband Bobs cancer so poignant and right on target.Everything in life is a gift, even death and cancer, asthis book points out. As Vicki writes, we come tosee the living experience of ourselves, no adjectives

needed. Enjoy these little essay gems!

Scott Kiloby, author of Living Relationship: Finding

Harmony With Others


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Bigger Than The SkyA Radical Awakening

Vicki Woodyard

Non-Duality Press


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BIGGERTHANTHESKY

2014 Vicki Woodyard2014 Non-Duality Press

Vicki Woodyard has asserted her right under the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of thiswork.

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form orby any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permissionin writing from the Publisher.

Non-Duality Press| PO Box 2228 | Salisbury | SP2 2GZUnited Kingdom

ISBN: 978-1-908664-45-7

www.non-dualitypress.org


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Foreword .............................................................. xiNote to the Reader ...............................................xivPeter ...................................................................... 1How it Began ......................................................... 2Where Do I Stand? ................................................ 5

Who Are We Then? ............................................... 7A Conversation With Peter .................................... 9Bare ......................................................................13Life Is a Ballet .......................................................15The Great Physician ..............................................17Love Between the Lines ........................................19

My Place In the Inner World .................................21An Invitation to Rest ........................................... 23Bigger Than the Sky ..............................................25Losing Interest in Your Story ................................27The Wind on Your Skin ........................................28An Awakened Man .............................................. 29Faltering Steps ......................................................31A Message to Peter ................................................33Nothing to Cling to ..............................................35Breaking ............................................................... 36ICU ...................................................................... 38Peter and the Cat ................................................. 40Peters Birthday .....................................................42

This, Too, Shall Pass ............................................ 44Who Is the True Guru? ........................................45Peace Descends .................................................... 46Grace ................................................................... 48Remembering Myself ........................................... 49

TABLE OF CONTENTS


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A Grateful Amen ..................................................51Hard Times ...........................................................53

The Great Silence .................................................55Ho Ho! ................................................................ 56The Blessedness of Letting Go ..............................57No One Ever Goes Away ......................................58God Has a Sense of Humor ..................................59A Wide Wildness ..................................................61

A Quiet Vibrancy ................................................ 63Consolation from Peter ........................................ 64Temporary Good News ........................................ 66Ease ..................................................................... 69Downhill Fast .......................................................71The Show Must Go On ........................................72

A Diamond Tear ...................................................74Dreams of Love.....................................................76Dwindling Down to Nothing ................................78A Jeweled Net of Grace ....................................... 80Self-Kindness ........................................................82Going With the Flow ........................................... 84Only Peace Lies Ahead ........................................ 86You Are What Bob Is ........................................... 88Keeping Busy ....................................................... 89No Time or Space .................................................91A Gentle Simplicity ............................................. 93An Awake Heart .................................................. 94The Nub of a Wing .............................................. 96

The Other Sidea Meditation ............................ 98You Are the Self ................................................ 100The Illusion of Time ...........................................103The Ultimate Luxury..........................................105The Core of the Heart ....................................... 106


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Touched by the Hand of Sorrow .........................108The Hermit Leaves the Hut: A Little Story

about Wholeness ........................................ 109The Everyday Entrance to Eternity ..................... 111The Last Message ................................................112


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FOREWORD

Vicki Woodyards writing is about reality. She revealsthe place beyond pain and suffering by being factualand direct, by looking straight at suffering. The magic

of her writing is directness, humor, and artistry exact-ing a sweetness that transcends suffering.

How does Vicki achieve this? In this book it is byway of a literary relationship with Peter. Now Petersa whole other influence in my life. I didnt know Peterpersonally, but his website, sentient.org, inspired me

to start nonduality.com.Sentient.org was dedicated to Ramana Maharshiand consisted of a collection of writings from enlight-ened sages living and deceased. So heres what wehave in this book. Two people facing every shape andshadow of sorrow. Two people seeing through sorrow,seeing what is real. Peter and Vicki emerge as a pairfor 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 getsput down too. Oy. At some point you have to laugh atit all. You have to see what really matters. Peter andVicki do. I did. You will.

Thats what this book is: community. Like the oldNonduality Salon, its a community in which yourenot safe. Sorry about that. You have to face pain andsorrow. Theres nothing to protect you here. How elseto realize what Vicki confesses: In one sense, sorrow


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is the true guru, and when it burns away the dross ofthe self, only holy ash remains.

Jerry Katz


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FOR PETER

I will meet you out beyond the breakingbut how will I know you?

For you have disappeared into your lifeand come out no one, ho ho.

Perhaps a memory of youwill light the blueness of the sky

and I will recognize the taste ofconversation we once had andthen we disappeared into the fire.


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Note to the Reader

The essays that make up this book are not in strictchronological order. They are more in kyros (Gods)

time than chronos (clock and calendar) time. WhatI hope is clear is how Peter and I flowed togetherthrough a dark tunnel of time. As a result, this bookwas written.

Some of these essays appeared in Life With A HoleIn It: Thats How The Light Gets In.

Vicki Woodyard


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Peter

In a time of overwhelm, a man named Peter befriendedme online. He had founded sentient.org, one of theearliest spiritual sites. He never gave his last nameor where he lived. The facts about Peter are few; he

preferred it that way.Little did I know that Peters words, so simple at

the time, would continue to bear fruit for me andothers. I do not know when Peter died. He just grewweaker and less able to compose emails to me and hisother friends.

Now his light emanates from these pages. Welcometo the story of Peter and me.


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How It Began

You are the sky. Everything else its just theweather.

Pema Chodron

When my husband was dying, I began an email corre-

spondence with a man named Peter who was ill froma series of strokes. He could barely get around andyet he told me he was bigger than the sky. After hisstrokes, he found that the old pile of adjectives aroundhim did him no good. I am a good-looking man, amans man, he told me once. And yet he found him-

self unable to walk down the hall to the bathroom fortwo years running. The new adjectives people wereusing were not particularly helpful. Strings of wordslike poor prognosis, stroke victim, unable to workwere now applied to him.

Peter was barely holding onto life and my husbandwas dying. Neither Peter nor I had time to waste onconcepts. Although we had both been on the Way fora long time, now we jettisoned any deep thoughts inexchange for the chance to hang out in the rarefiedair of simplicity.

Peter had been to spiritual teachers and foundthem to be useless. They could not help me, he

said. They simply did not know how. So he did theonly thing he was able to do. He sat in the sunshinewith a little cat named Alex on his chest. The catspurrs, in lieu of a nursing staff, conveyed to him thehealing power of nature. He watched the robins run


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across the grass because they were what he saw. Hewas grateful in the most basic way. And he began to

realize that what he had found was the living experi-ence of himself. No adjectives need apply.

And so I sat in my leather recliner in perfectlygood health, and remembered that I too was not whoI 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 biggerthan any of them. I knew what Peter knewthat Iwas bigger than the sky. I was bigger than anythingthat could be named or described. Peter is no longeramong 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 amin pain, I yell. And when I fall down, I say ho ho.But he never latched onto anything. His own sense ofI ambecame stronger than any stroke could ever be.

Once he had a brilliant career and then, after thestrokes, he had almost no memory of who he was orwho his friends were. He couldnt make change. Buthe sure made a difference. You see, the I amthat weall are is indestructible. It is too bad we dont learnthis unless we are reduced to helplessness. In Peterscase, he saw through the illusion of having a separateself. He realized that no matter where he found him-self, 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, hemanaged to leave me with a record of reality that sur-vives only on love. Putting dogma aside, he reveled in


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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 pow-erful as to render me ripped open. The inner becamethe outer and vice versa. He treated me to stories ofhis cats; and I, in return, swapped tales of how it feltto be in charge of someone who was dying. Youdthink these exchanges would have been sad, but they

werent. They were fashioned of something as fine asthe ether, as indescribable as air and as necessary.

For what its worth, I hold your hand in this,he said, and every time I read the words of my gen-tle friend, his far-reaching wisdom, sprinkled withlaughter, carries me back home to the heart.

When I take a walk around my neighborhood, Ioften see the robins running across the grass. My heartopens to the understanding that Peter gave me. I ambigger than anything I see. I am bigger than the sky.


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Where Do I Stand?

One of the absolute qualifications for a writer isnot 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 Himselfwere listening.

Writers, and poets in particular, know how toencode these questions in order to help them live. Forexample, this whole book is about soul, or spirit. ForPeter 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-be-tween the lines. When he described himself as beingbigger than the sky, that was not to be taken literally. Itwas 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 gobeyond words. But doesnt every good writer do that?I hope so.


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As far as my speaking to Bob as if he were aliveand 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 plantit for higher purposes. What grows is the eternal sideof love. Yes, there are tears involved. They soften theground for that flower of love to be planted. And sowe gather courage to go on without their physical

presence. Peter is no longer on this earth, but hisspirit is hanging around


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Who Are We Then?

I sat watching the body of my daughter lying in thesmall coffin.It wasnt her.I lay awake at night mourning.

It wasnt me.My son turned inward.It wasnt him.My husband fell silent.It wasnt him.Who was it?

I sat and wrote about my daughter.It wasnt me.My husband became a workaholic.It wasnt him.Our son grew distant.It wasnt him.

My husband grew ill.It wasnt him.I was angry.It wasnt me.I sat watching the body of my husband lying in

his coffin.It wasnt him.My son and I were strong for each other.It wasnt us.


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Who are we when the chips are downand the shit has hit the proverbial fan?

It isnt us.

Who are we when, like angels, we soar intothe impossible with great dignity? It isnt us.Who are we when, like mighty fortresses,we stand against the darkness?

It isnt us.

Who am I? Who are we when we loveand fail to feel anything but devastation?Who are we when we numb out andretreat into the fortress of the mind.

Who rolls away the stone of griefand says, Come out, the light will no longer bedenied.Who are we then? Who are we?


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A Conversation with Peter

Most of the time I just try to rest and play withmy gentle little cat in the sunlight. Nothing else isimportant.

Peter

The things that Peter said carried great resonance forme and, with his permission, I am sharing some ofour dialogue below.

Peter:This life of ours is so shortan eye blink and it

is gone. I think it is very lovely that you and your hus-band could hold hands together even while walkingthrough hell. Who knows what may come? In joy orin suffering, this amazing life dazzles us all.

Vicki:You sound as if you might be ill yourself.

Peter: Thats what my doctors say. I dont believethem. My little cat never gives tomorrow or yesterdaya thought. Sometimes she hurts and asks for comfort.Sometimes she is tired and lies gently in the warmsun smiling up at me. What more could there be? Nowonder Ramana Maharshi loved Lakshmi (his favorite

cow) so very much. Lakshmi and my little cat are notgoing anywhere. They never have. How blessed.

Rest is greatly undervalued. It seems to me thatmost people in this society have not had genuine restsince they were young children. No wonder there is


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such unhappiness. I feel that most of the folks sit-ting in satsangs are really just looking for a little rest.

Animals are so much smarter. They rest when theyare tired. Now theres a sensible life!

It is my own experience that pain is somethingof an eye-opener. Pain that goes on for years tends todrown out the silliness of belief systems in favor ofdirect 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 tendto make all other sounds meaningless. Only the beat-ing of ones own true heart has meaning.

Vicki: Right after Bob was diagnosed, I wrote toPamela Wilson; I clung to these words of hers in mysadness and uncertainty. Rest and rapture, what elseis there? she said.

Peter:The person that Pamela says was her teacher(Robert Adams) took a long, slow time in dying ofParkinsons disease. I met him about a year beforethe 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 deeplywithin himself. Very lovely.

It is my own experience that suffering is what most

of us do best. And much of that suffering is a result oftrying to fend off strong feelings. It is my experiencethat nothing works anyway. In really serious illnessthere often is no way out. So why not do the onlything left open, which is to rest and enjoy the light


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sparkling on the trees? There really is nothing else.You will think Ive lost it, but for me the aloneness

has become a very lovely thing. I do not feel alone,as in isolated or cut off. Rather this aloneness is in asense a powerlessness, which is very peaceful. Therereally is nothing I or anyone can do, so I may as wellsmile with my little cat in my arms and live as bestI can.

As I type, that cat is asking for dinner. She is reallygood at being present at all times, especially at din-nertime. I think she has more wisdom in her littlefinger than 99.999% of all the so-called teachers outthere. And talk about good-looking! Only Ramanahad a face as lovely as hers.

Illness (and anything else for that matter) is beyondmy or anyones control. Sigh,Im not very good withwords. I think Im trying to say that I have found thatplanning and worrying (which the mind is designedto do) go on, of course. But so what. My mind maycontinue to suffer, but thats not me, so let it suffer ifit wants to. It is none of my concern. There is nothingit can do anyway.

Vicki: I understand how little energy you have. If Ihad any choice about the matter, I would just stopeverything and be like your beloved cat.

Peter: I feel my friend the cat has more competenceas a healer than all of these others combined. Not tomention infinitely more compassion.

Vicki: Gurus can be just as bad as doctors.


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Peter: Yes. Why anyone would want to teach (asopposed to sharing) is a mystery to me. I feel that

sometimes someone has an experience and thinks heis special, so he puts up a sign and advertises his ser-vices. The desperate and the frightened come, investheavily, and eventually end up with an experienceof their own, and then put up their own sign on thestreet. Invisible prison walls.

It has been many years since I felt a differencebetween guru and student, or awakened and unawak-ened. It is my experience that such terms have nomeaning, serving only to get in the way of time spentlying in the warm sunlight with a cat in ones arms.

My note on this: God speaks to us in varied ways,

including cats and sunlight and newfound friends.The only thing to do is listen.

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Bigger Than the Sky Sample