Category: Soul journey

The Big Picture

The universe felt overwhelming to me when I was a little girl. One late-night thought of the vast unfathomable cosmos, and my five-year-old brain would freeze in terror. I learned to distract myself as I grew older, but the background fear never disappeared entirely. In college, a class in astronomy activated it again. It was only in later years, as I began to pursue a spiritual quest that some sense of meaning and safety in the universe came to me.

Over the years I have grown in my acceptance of what Native Americans have called “the Great Mystery.” It is multi-faceted and not a puzzle to solve but a vision of oneness that humans eventually learn to surrender to—either in life or in death. In life, we often get lost in the details and a need to control them. But if we can let go and accept everything in the span of our lifetime, inner peace arises within and remains with us always, even, or especially, at death. Some people call this peace God, or infinite consciousness. Language does not capture it, but the heart knows it. In moments of heart-centered connection to the people and the world around us, we are one with a presence beyond words.

When I am in that oneness, I see the perfection in all things, in my own life and in all life. There are no mistakes. In every detail of life is a light visible throughout the cosmos. When we accept our lives as perfectly unfolding, that light shines everywhere, and we relax into what has been called peace beyond understanding. For we cannot really “understand” life and death; we can only surrender to it and thus experience what is outside of the realm of understanding: Presence.

In that space, I have had the most profound sense of being part of a complex tapestry of beingness, every thread interwoven with every other thread, always connected and evolving within Presence itself. Each soul on an infinite journey to know itself. God experiencing God. My soul and divine intelligence chose the design of my life so that I could experience all the details of a human existence and eventually come to know everything as Heaven on Earth. Ultimately, there are no divisions in the universe. Humans experience division in order to return to oneness and know it as who they are. To know the universe as oneself. This is the Big Picture.

It has taken me many years to reach this perspective. Yet within it, I realize that there really are no “years,” or time as humans have defined it. The greatest sages have spoken of the eternal Now. This sweet moment of timeless time is what we have been given. When I surrender to that wisdom, the peace of my limitless soul informs all my life, and every “picture” before me, big or small, becomes one with an ever-changing cosmic kaleidoscope of light and divine connection. And as the full moon rises perfectly over the dark trees outside my window, my fear is replaced with gratitude.

Breathe Your Life

Mystics have written that each breath holds birth and death in it. Perhaps each lifetime is one long inhalation and exhalation, as Spirit fills us and then gradually, finally, empties back into the Source from which it arose. We are spirits passing through, part of a mystery that only our souls know the extent of. Our human lives courageously carry us into the unknown of life on Earth, and as we travel, soul awareness slowly seeps into our consciousness. If we are fortunate, we grow wiser with each year we live.

Those who have passed through a serious illness, such as cancer, and come out the other side, often carry within them kernels of insight that may help them understand a bit of life’s mysteries. At the very least, it expands their view of their own lives and life itself. (I think of writers Mark Nepo and Suleika Jaouad.) They have looked into infinity and seen themselves. Everything is different after that.

During the months I was treated for breast cancer, I had moments of seeing the universe as a giant tapestry with moving parts that are perfectly interconnected. The pieces engage in a dance of beingness in which we all are included. There are no mistakes; everything unfolds according to a greater purpose that our souls know and our human selves catch glimpses of in our lifetimes. What I experienced carried me through treatment to survival. I could see at the deepest level that facing cancer was all part of my soul’s plan for this lifetime. I felt peace within my heart in that awareness.

A “peace that passes understanding,” as the saying goes. I experienced peace beyond any rational attempts to understand it. This is the peace that lives in each breath and is the essence of every one of our lifetimes. To live through both challenges and celebrations and accept them as integral parts of your life. The breath holds this wisdom within it. Each time you or I inhale, all of life moves into and through us. Each time we exhale, we fill the world with Source energy. The human form is a container for Spirit. When you consciously breathe your life, Spirit flowers in all you say and do.

Not everyone faces a health challenge that opens the door to eternity, but each of us, in the course of a lifetime, eventually looks beyond the mundane into the infinite. It is why we are here. To stand firmly on this Earth, this beloved blue planet full of varied experiences, and see the entire universe before us. It may happen at any time, for any reason. Or it may happen as you move through a “review” at the end of your life. Ultimately, you are Spirit embodied, and all the wisdom of the ages lives within you. Take a deep breath, open your heart, and see the invisible flow of your life and all lives, perfectly, peacefully, orchestrated in each moment.

The Changing, Yet Familiar, Landscape

I was born in Illinois and grew up in a rural area where farms, cornfields, and scattered houses dotted the landscape. My parents built their home on five acres in the countryside, not far from a small town where I subsequently went to school. My daily life was spent mainly outdoors, playing among the trees, fields, orchards, and gardens my dad planted. It was a small paradise, which I still hold in my heart and have gravitated toward in other places and other landscapes over the years.

As an adult, I’ve lived in or near urban areas (mainly Boston and San Francisco). I’ve loved the convenience and ease of living where I could walk everywhere or take public transportation. Neighborhoods with small gardened spaces and trees around the buildings or houses. Corner stores. But it has been the parks and nature sanctuaries where I have spent much of my time. That was the balance for me, a place to live where I could walk as well as visit natural settings. Easy access to buses, trains, and an airport where I could travel to other places in the world. The towns and yards changed over the years, west and east coasts, but each one seemed to fit my life at the time. Even a few years in Florida recently provided an entirely different experience of Nature.

After moving back to the Boston area three years ago, Anne and I began to look for an affordable place to live, in the midst of rising rents. That meant living further away from the city. We eventually found a place we love, but it has meant an adjustment in how we live our daily lives. There are no neighborhoods or corner stores like those we were used to. Instead, an almost rural landscape stretches around the small group of condos where we live: woods, fields, small houses, roads, and occasional shopping plazas. There is a town about a 50-minute walk away with a train to Boston and Cambridge (which I greatly appreciate!). We are grateful for so much here (birds in the trees outside our windows, open skies clearly visible, quiet), but the walkability factor has required us to let go of previous parameters and expectations.

In doing so, suddenly, one morning I was reminded of my own childhood home. We lived in the country, a rural area not that different (except for the cornfields!) from where we live now. School buses took me in town to school. My parents drove to local markets, etc. Trees surrounded our house. Have I come full circle, returning to a distantly familiar landscape, one I have to accustom myself to but that from that perspective becomes newly interesting?

Life is full of surprises and replays and new beginnings that remind us of past experiences. Everything is both old and brand new in our lives. There is nothing on Earth that has not been lived before in some form or another, and yet at the same time every experience feels like a new discovery. We have lived many lives, within this one and among those in the expansive past of the planet. Often that sense of deja vu touches our hearts deeply and opens us to possibility and a fresh outlook on daily life.

That is where I am now. I am living changes, centered in a new present. Simultaneously, I am being reminded of the rich and diverse past I have already lived. In the distance, a train whistle evokes both past and present-moment awareness. Landscapes shift throughout our lifetimes, and within that motion is the purpose of every life: soul expansion and recognition of our commonality in all experiences and all lifetimes. In that, we realize that every moment, every landscape, is a gift of grace.

Joy, Grief, and Miracles

My entire life I have carried within me, in equal parts, exquisite joy at being alive and profound grief at one day having to leave this world for the vast unknown of eternity. That unknown, and the sorrow surrounding it, frightened me terribly as a small child. At night, I would cry about this seemingly insoluble dilemma of life and death and the infinite universe. As I explored a spiritual path in my adult life, I came to see that this life/death dichotomy arose as part of being embodied spirit in physical human form. My soul saw no polarized separation; only my mind did.

There have always been times in my daily life when I saw the world as my soul did: expansive, wondrous, flowing, filled with miracles. When I am walking quietly in Nature, surrounded by birds and trees and flowers. When I am with friends and family, feeling the love that connects us. The trajectory of my life has been to balance out the joy and grief, to come to peace with all the varied and sometimes contradictory experiences of living as a human being on Earth. Perhaps this is what we are all doing in our own way.

Immersed in presence in the natural world, I feel that balance. Trees, birds, clouds, flowers, seasons. I am outside of time, beyond the mind’s observations. I connect to all parts of life with each breath. Breathing like a tree, like a flower, like a bird. Therein is calm, a surrender to something greater that is comforting not frightening. Here, infinity is who I am. It flows within me and surrounds me as well. In Nature, I recognize that life holds infinity in everything. Somehow grief falls away in those moments, and I only know the peace that is at the center of my soul.

The key perhaps is to see the entire world as one with Nature, to recognize that Mother Earth and Spirit are a single seamless creation with no beginning and no end. And within that eternal, never-ending Presence is something beyond the mind’s ability to understand. Only in completely letting go of the need to solve the puzzle of existence and accepting the wonders before us each day do we experience peace. And a balance that brings together joy and grief in the human heart and makes them whole.

This is where I am now, sitting silently on the edge of eternity and knowing it as who I am, who we all are. William Blake could hold “eternity in an hour,” infinity in the palm of his hand. He saw a “World in a Grain of Sand, and a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” To me, this is the greatest and most exquisitely beautiful wisdom I’ve ever encountered. Within it is the amazing grace we all hope to find in our lifetimes, no further away than our own miraculous hands or the flowers at our feet.

Life Partners, Life Friendships

My friends Savanna and Katie were together nearly 50 years, until Savanna’s recent passing this summer. One of their daughters created a touching video photo montage of their life together, complete with perfectly chosen music. As I watched it, with alternating tears and smiles, I could feel the depth of their love and the ongoing joy of the life they shared. Such a sweet blessing—for them and for all who knew them. It made me think of so many other friends with decades-long marriages or partnerships. Gay, straight, bi, trans—all relationships based in caring, devotion, laughter, joy, tears, and a mutual appreciation for one another. Anne and I have been together 41 years ourselves. The longer I live, the more I feel the preciousness of these lifelong connections, interlaced with shared memories and experiences.

And this applies to friendships as well. I have friends I’ve known since grade school, high school, college, and work, each of them unique and irreplaceable. In the 1970s, I lived in a household with four other women that holds a special place in my heart. We were feminists active in the Boston women’s movement, several of us in a women’s literature graduate program at Goddard-Cambridge. Out of that came the humorous name we called ourselves: Cranford, based on a 19th century novel by Elizabeth Gaskell about a community of women who lived together without husbands. We shared our lives and all the exciting changes at that time: women’s music, presses, magazines, sports teams, activist groups. We latter-day Cranford sisters have remained friends ever since, the five of us (with our partners) meeting via Zoom recently, in San Francisco, Boston, and Western Massachusetts, coming together across time and space to reconnect with love.

Whether partner or friend, those in our lives mean everything to us. These are the souls we’ve chosen, prebirth, to travel through this life with. There are no coincidences in these arrangements. We came here to be together for however long we’re meant to be, sharing exactly what we’re meant to share. Learning and growing together and separately. That’s why we often feel like we’ve known someone before when we first meet them. Souls can travel together through lifetimes, playing different roles, experiencing different life lessons. Perhaps all of life is one reunion after another within a giant tapestry of being and soul expansion.

Every Christmas Eve, I talk on the phone long-distance with my friend Barb, whom I’ve known since we were 11. Our families spent Christmas Eve together throughout our childhood and adolescent years in Illinois. The golden nugget of those memories has stayed with us all our lives, through moving to different coasts, after the deaths of each of our parents, throughout changes, differences, and similarities. Each December 24, all of it comes together in one phone call in which we remember all the years of knowing and loving each other. We laugh and shed tears, and we renew our connection.

I treasure that phone call and our friendship, just as I treasure each one of my friends and especially dear Anne who has been by my side more than half my life. There is nothing like a life partner or a life friendship. It is one of the greatest gifts life on Earth brings us. May I always hold that deep appreciation and gratitude in my heart.