expansion – Holly Rose Thomas

In My Desire to be Free

March 11, 2023September 23, 2025Leave a comment

An instant of loving communication

A person meditating on a rug with lanterns either side of them, overlooking a beautiful lake and mountains — *_{Author image, thanks to NightCafe AI Art Generator}*

A silent smile within the heart
A grace that lets the waters start to run
An opening upon my brow
And my body is alive again
With the pulsing energy of your release

A gentle opening within,
The centre breaking open
To admit an aurora of heavenly sensations

Light fills my body
Drenching my heart, my throat, my bodily mind
Deposing my form and loosening binds to all that I believed myself attached to
Just one instant before

Vibrations become me
My whole experience
My whole identity
Relieved from the suffering of separate responses
And separate forms

Breathe in gratitude
Breath becomes light
Energy dethroning form
Visceral, thick, flowing through extremities
Expanding their walls
Searing within
Revealing depths of unhidden space

I can meet you here
I can invite you deep into this circumstance
Deep into this sphere of relief, of releasing mind
I can see you, vivid and alive, shining within the greater mind that we share
Shining upon me, in all the glory misinterpreted through separate mind
As distinct from what I am

It is in our shared mind,
The mind that encompasses the whole,
That is the whole
The mind that, in singularity, is my mind
This is where I find you
This is where I receive you
And this is where I adore you,
Forever, in this timeless instant of eternal communication
In my desire to be free

The Veil

March 10, 2023September 23, 2025Leave a comment

That perfect moment in the depths of the full moon when you realise that everything is alive

A startlingly beautiful, powerful full moon behind a half mist-soaked mountain, reflecting in glistening water — *_{Author image, thanks to NightCafe AI Art Generator}*

Times when the veil is thin
And all of life breaks open within
The light in the sky is a thunderous din
As she wakes me from slumber to welcome her in

All is wild and alive
The attributes of an opening mind
The raining of stars in a heart that’s revived
From deep tender longing to finally arrive

Solid, beating, tranquil, true
Right in the centre that forms the root
From which the highest certainty rules
Directing the mind that inherently values

Her pulsing, gentle, articulate beat
The accompanying tide at her moonlit feet
That gives and receives through her rhythmic, sweet
Impossibly powerful, full, mystique

The heart of heaven is felt within
Her rising, beautiful, star-filled brim
Expanding as the enchanted sing
The angels’ chorus, enlightened, begins

I wake and feel the thinning veil
Rent and ripped in tatters and tails
Spinning useless upon the gales
Of an open mind, released from its trails

I wake and feel the parted seams
Releasing me to beyond my dreams
As the wildest gentlest shining gleams
Reflect within my heart as it beams

Within This Instant

March 1, 2023September 23, 2025Leave a comment

A very singular solution

Worlds being grown in petri dishes — *_{Author image, thank to NightCafe AI Art Generator}*

Let me give this day to you in gratitude for all the peace you’ve given
And continue to within the certainty I’m living through you
In this present, glorious, powerful security
That deep within and far beyond the world of form I’m free

The separate mind is a confusion of a billion troubled cares
Confessing instability, transgressions, unaware
Of all the power that is circulating through its very veins and nervous system
As it shuns the thoughts that it itself has given
But has bound up in a memory that seems to play before its eyes
Surpassing inhibitions, heedless to its troubled cries

Into this belief in anguished nothingness the answer comes
And offers to the asking mind one solution to its myriad questions
In a singular experience that shows
Far beyond misapprehension that the world is grown inside a petri dish
Within the stark laboratory of separate mind
That seeks to circumvent responsibility for what it finds
For what it fears, as, troubled now, unconscious, disbelieving
Of ‘the how’ the world is made each instant
Deep within the tempest of its own beliefs and every thought it thinks
And everything it sees; the circular experience of fathering a dream

In gratitude I give this day to you as I begin to see
That deep within the dreaming of such instability
There falls and lies and rises through the misted anguish that I knew before
A new interpretation that will feed me at my core

We know that a theology on which every mind can agree
Is stark impossibility and not to be alluded to or dreamed
But an experience that takes each mind beyond the tramp
Of trudging through the suffering of pain unto indignity
That takes the hand and leads the dance out to the starry universe
Beyond what it had previously allowed itself to know and see
But accessed only deep within and centred through the body mind
A root that guides the self to the experience that its free

A common experience is ours to know, indeed

I rest within my gratitude, my rancour is dispersed and cowed
As to this great awakening I open and allow myself
To conjugate and be the beauty of the universal peace of clarity
As all I’ve been, within this instant, is released

All I’ve Ever Been

February 27, 2023September 23, 2025Leave a comment

A love poem to water

Pink blossom trees overhanging a beautiful still lake, a gently sloping bank just asking you to sit for while then dive in! — *_{Author image, thanks to NightCafe AI}*

I let myself be water
As I finally choose to see
That deep within the mysteries
Of life, I’m always free

I let myself be water
As my tendencies to hide
Are loosening as the swell of beauty
Rises through my peace of mind

I struggled with my water
Because I refused to see
That deep within the mysteries of the soul
I’m running free

Coursing through the fields of battle
Ever flowing rhyme,
Past such scenes of devastation
Guardians of time

I’d forgotten I was water
As I tried to be
Something that was static
Cast in stone amid the stream

In the dream of sanctuary
I’ve finally deigned to tell
Stories of the gratitude
That lift my heart to swell

With the water’s majesty
And with her sacred flow,
As I return to that which courses
Humble through the gloam

In gratitude I rise
Amid the water’s folky rhyme,
Its purity immerses my
Intention to divine

The fear that I had lived within,
Believed myself to be,
It’s thus released and handed to
The flow of perfect peace

The mysteries that engulfed my mind
And left me crooked, bowed,
Are now revealed in candour
As my heart finds its way home

The spaciousness, a watery grave
That’s separation’s tomb
Is waiting with her open arms
I flow into her womb

As I become the ocean
With such startling clarity
I recognise within myself
It’s all I’ve ever been

Tsunami Rising

February 20, 2023September 23, 2025Leave a comment

On being washed away forever

A very stormy sea with one enormous wave, a moody sky behind with the sun breaking through — *_{Author image, thanks to NightCafe AI Art Generator}*

The depths of life that spring from me
As I decide, within your freedom
Now, to let these mysteries
Evolve within your certainty

I witness to the rising of the tide
Upon a swelling sea,
A wave ascending in my breadth
Encompassing all I have been

Then bursting forth through troubled seams
That tried to hold and held no more,
Exploding past the girth
That I had tightened till my sides were sore

And as I seek to cast my net
In wider climes than heretofore,
I’m tumbled from the vessel
I’d been sailing to the shore

A vast arising wells below,
Upsetting all the plans I’d laid
Within my static grieving woe:
A desperate heart resolved to hide

With windows shaken to their soul
And shattered glass upon the floor,
I’m hurled into reality
A course I’ve never known before

I feel the wakings of a mind
That’s never let the love of souls
Interpolate, become at once
A dazzling faultless star filled whole

And in these dreams where memory
Had held itself so fast and sure,
Capitulation bows to freedom
Devastation rules no more

I wake into the breathless air
The sunshine beating on my skin,
I rise as from the depths of care
To claim what life is nourishing

I’m reconfigured from the old
Interpreted all fresh and new,
The language that I spoke before
Has been released, replaced, renewed

And as I cry humility
Comes rolling ‘cross the pummelled sands,
Approaching ever closer
To the place in which I stand

And as I laugh and let my mind
Be raised unto these heightened views,
I witness to the depths of life
Arising in myself in you

Ever Known

February 11, 2023September 23, 2025Leave a comment

Words received in the wildness and openness of the full moon

*_{Image created by author with NightCafe AI Art Generator}*

The wildness of the mind
That is discovering its way home
It reaches to the mind
Communicating with its own

Joining in the sultry light
The ever rising moon
Is casting on the shrubs
That skirt the desert’s holy runes

It wanders in the scrub
And finds its way by scent alone
To everlasting openness
Expanding through its starry dome

Into the gentle stillness
With the quiet night time sounds
Surrounding it, encapsulate
By air and solid ground

The mind that finds its way
Past evil traps to sacred ways
That travels forward to rescind
The painful darkest days

That casts intrepid light
Upon the core of what was heard
Just a moment previously
Unlearning all it learned

Unhearing all it heard
Now disillusioned to the sight
Of everything it thought it saw
Within the misty light

That opens into heartfelt sorrow
As the die is thrown
Into the abyss
Of all that heretofore was known

Waking as from dreams of horror
Mysteries shatter, fall
Into a billion pieces
As the battle cries its call

Out across deserted lands
That bleak and sombre seemed
To lie in wait before you
Now transformed and blessed, redeemed

Into this courageous mind
That is washed clean, prepared for new
Enters the beginning
Of a new and precious truth

Entering the sunset
Of a peace that calls it home
To where it’s ever tranquil
Ever nourished, ever known

The Lion’s Heart

December 28, 2022September 23, 2025Leave a comment

As the sky splits open to reveal your soul

You are the light that burns in me
The lantern blazing through the dream
You are the peace humility
Can recognise and rest within

You are the great expansive mind
That wreaks a wildish havoc home
Unravelling the dearth of time
And glistening upon the throne

That opens as I gaze upon
The beauty that is not your realm
But feels as though it’s splitting to
Succumb to that which lies beyond

You are the peace that pulls me
To the deepest place within my heart
That opens me to caverns
Where I hid the painful, searing, dark

You are the fire that burns within
That draws me to your fireside
The ocean that I dive within
To find the things I’d hoped to hide

You purify the restless cawing
Cackling realms of graceless hell
And raise them up through tundras
To the sunshine on the shining swell

And as the sky with stars of gold
Decrees your shining constant light
Splits open to reveal your soul
I am beheld with blessed sight

And in your wholly loving gaze
I stand redeemed, re-graced, untamed
But gentle in your presence
As the lion’s heart regained

I stand within your wholeness
And I love what you have done
I am forever blessed in you
Your holy light, your son

If Only We’d Know

July 8, 2022September 23, 2025Leave a comment

Letting in the life that is waiting to grow

The sun breaking through the clouds, shining on different layers of worlds — *_{Author image, thanks to NightCafe AI Art Generator}*

A space in the sunshine of dreams
Has opened, responding to calling for more
A grip on the life that held meaning for me
Is released as desire cracks open a core
That was dark with defences, its surface rock hard
The light that pours through makes me choke for a moment
As breath enters in where before it was barred
And a blue swirling centre is unlocked, unsown

Now I can see you
And breathe my inheritance
Though I’m restricted
By thoughts of intelligence
Wisdom and pride
That will anger my core
If they’re questioned or queried
Held up to abhor

But within the catastrophe of how I’ve failed
To begin to be happy through telling my tales
With this rushing of energy into the void
Comes life unabashed, unrelenting, devoid
Of the suffering, long underpinning a woe
That releases each instant if only we’d know
That this deep precious moment, the centre of mind
Our attention can pierce, our presence can find

It can only be known, it can only be seen
Through the eyes of a dreamer who ceases to dream
Through the heart of a speaker who ceases to speak
Through the might of a thinker refusing to think
For themselves, who lets heavenly thoughts cast their moors
Within their deep harbours, upon their bleak shores
And lets in the life that is waiting to grow
Within us each moment, if only we’d know

Of Sound, and of Silence

June 28, 2022September 23, 2025Leave a comment

A moment of recognising wholeness and peace, with complete gratitude

An abstract image implying a close up of sound waves — *_{Author image, thanks to NightCafe AI Art Generator}*

The help is more available than the pain
This strikes me as I listen today
After spending some time letting words flow onto the page
The fearful mind has been exposed and witnessed to, and now it can be still
The help appears: available to me in my mind
Perfect in its simplicity, glorious in its breadth
Its breath moves through me and I recognise its melody
Resting in each pause with a true master’s understanding
Of sound, and of silence

Rest — internal, graceful
What is my lesson today?
What do I need to understand?
Where in my mind, in your mind, will you take me today?
This fiction is a classroom for the evolution of my soul
The rest appears; the help is the rest
The peace that passeth understanding every instant but now
I open into gratitude as the past is released into half-remembered patterns
Of sound, and of silence

The world itself is opening within my heart
There is nothing outside of the self I am in you
Everything is releasing and everything is available
All help, all rest, all peace, it is available to me now
You are the master that knows only giving all to all
You the one with perfect grace, perfect understanding
You the only path worth walking in the dreaming of this world
In the dreaming of colour and of darkness
Of sound, and of silence

Unimaginably Beautiful

August 16, 2020September 23, 2025Leave a comment

A poem experienced through a glorious gladioli

*_{Author photo — the glorious gladioli – all rights and permissions reserved}*

I look into your face
For a perfect moment the universe is the intoxicating colour of your skin

Richness magnified intensely, my consciousness enfolded in the satiny immersion of your electrifying expression

I am saturated by the iridescent nature of your sepals’ colouring
Enjoying your obedience to the never-ending question of transition

Sleeping reptilian spines, ripening daily, revealing rich cascading blooms
Bursting suddenly, astonishingly, to the irresistible command of a forceful, silently chiming directive

A most remarkably inspiring shedding of skin

Destinies fulfilled
Treacherous, cavernous ways through deadly dunes averted
Songs of the open and blissful heart sung in euphoric harmony

An entire universe of grace, unimaginable beauty
A wormhole transporting me to flowing wells of freedom inside the openness of every blooming shell

The depths I can go to in me through you
As surprising and as beautiful as the never-ending opening of your soul to me

I cannot defy you. I must awaken, enliven, flower in irrevocable glory
Despite the fear that closes on my mind and holds me, trembling, still
I cannot respond to you but with my own blossoming of mind, my voice and my rising, grateful heart

Your petals will fall with the irrepressible illusion of time
My petals will droop and stale, as yours, before the body’s time-felt end

But beyond these death haunted dreams the glory of eternity wakes in the spirit of your irreversible flourishing and my breathless witnessing

I will always know your gifts and hear your song, alive, in this perfect, present heaven

And I will ever know the timeless constancy of our connection, our brotherhood, our love, throughout the ever-expanding infinitudes of mind