More
Than Reality
“The
further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is
everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin
of all that is ordinary. Light is in the broken bottle and the
diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water
dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well
as on the top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and
the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.”
Mark Nepo
(The Book of Awakening)
There is a scene in Neil
Gaiman's book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, in which the
protagonist, a seven year old boy, is “hanging deep beneath the
water” of a magical ocean contained within a bucket, and is
suddenly able to see all that is. He reports seeing “the world I
had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that
the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday
cake...I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the
real...Everything whispered inside me. Everything spoke to
everything, and I knew it all.” In Gaiman's strange way, he is
saying much the same thing as Mark Nepo in the quote above—there is
much to this life, this reality, that we do not see. We do not
appreciate its depth and mystery simply because we have committed
ourselves to living only on the surface.
Children know it all.
They are one with the holiness of creation and its beauty. The world
is a wondrous place before our eyes become jaded by notions of rights
and ownership, because children have no such rights. They live in the
moment and everything seems magical—because it is magical. The
Creator, that entity which we call God, is in every drop of it. As
children we see this, but as we grow up, too many other layers of
importance overshadow it and obscure our vision. That doesn't mean
that the divine is not still there. It only means that we have to
remove the scales from our eyes, and the desire for worldly things
from our hearts. We have to see again with the eyes of a child how
precious and fragile this beautiful world is. We have to once again
see its magic and mystery, and want, above all else, to protect and
preserve it.
Last night, Liza barked
at the door. I flipped on the porch light and opened the door to see
what the fuss was about. There on my front porch was a possum,
eating cat food. He stared at me with black button eyes set in the
perfect triangle of his tan face, and I looked back at him. He didn't
run away, and I didn't scream. We silently acknowledged one another,
and then I closed the door and turned off the light. Everything
speaks to everything. It was a holy moment.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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