The leaves of the cottonwood tree across the street are oscillating joyously in the wind and light this morning, fluttering with delight. A huge rainbow stretches across the sky, plunging into the neighbor’s house. A mourning dove is sitting atop the street lamp sunning himself as tiny white clouds blow past behind him. When I look out the window again, he is gone—an empty space at the top of the street lamp.
We ARE the body, and the world, and all of creation—and when we really see and hear and feel all of this, it is fluid, boundless, ever-new, unrepeatable, ecstatic, bursting with love and wonder and joy—and at the heart of it, this still presence, this awakeness that is GOD.
You might be thinking, sounds nice, but what about all the bad stuff? And somehow, that too is included in this ecstatic dance. Speaking personally, I am endlessly grateful for losing an arm, for having cancer, for the years of alcoholic drinking, for my finger-biting compulsion that still flares up, and for all the ways life has disappointed me, frustrated me, irritated me, insulted me, and not gone the way I think it should, because in all of that, something deeper emerges.
