Tag: infinity

Happy Now

Life is a mystery, a composite, a kaleidoscope. You win, you lose; you cry, you laugh; you grieve, you celebrate. The door is closed; the window is open. You can go through life experiencing only one of these possibilities, or you can experience them all. Most of us are in the latter group, but sometimes we get stuck on one side or another of a polarity. We need to be reminded that life on Earth has many sides. That’s what our loved ones do for us.

A month or so ago, a longtime friend of Anne’s and mine died suddenly of a heart attack. He and his husband had been together more than 40 years, just as Anne and I have. It was shattering to hear the news, especially since we recently lost another friend who had been with her wife almost 50 years. I found myself worrying about Anne and me, as well as about everyone we know—future illnesses and deaths, impending grief and sadness. I was stuck on the side of fear and depression, which can happen, especially at night (“night mind” we call it in our house). This was when Anne stepped in with the perfect comment: “We have plenty of time to be depressed in the future. Let’s be happy now.” I laughed. Thank you, dear Anne.

Such a wise truth, that. One I sometimes forget when my emotions sweep through me. I inherited both sides of optimist/worrier outlooks from my parents. For example, I can recall my father staring out the window one morning and saying, “I hope that’s not poison ivy on that tree.” My mother, on the other hand, pointed out a nearby trumpet vine with bright-orange flowers. They both had worries, but my mother’s inclination was always to put a positive spin on things. My dad used humor for that spin. He was a very funny man. When I was tearfully suffering through an existential dilemma of not wanting to die or live forever, he paused thoughtfully and finally said (with a twinkle in his eye), “Well, you just can’t please some people.” We both laughed. My parents looked to each other for the gifts of humor and positivity. Anne and I do too. Together we give one another balance at key moments.

I can’t control life’s vacillations, but I am learning to accept them. When upsetting events occur, I rely on loving friends and family for a shoulder to cry on or laughter to balance the tears. With time, a larger overview brings perspective. From my soul’s point of view, life and death are one, a guided journey through infinity. The course of our lives takes us to that vantage point. Every life event opens the door wider to the cosmos and our place in it. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s excruciatingly painful at times if a parent, friend, or life partner dies. Yet, in the midst of our grief, there are often one or two human angels who appear, to provide solace and peace of mind.

I have encountered such angels—sometimes strangers, sometimes friends—at times of loss in my life. Even now, as I feel apprehension for the future aging and passing of those I love (and myself), there is a part of me that trusts in something greater than I can even imagine with my human mind. It is my soul that trusts, beyond all lifetimes, in the presence of Spirit (or God) in all things. Love as well as sorrow can open our hearts to the soul’s wisdom, the soul’s light. In loving one another, we experience all of life, and it passes through us with such divine beauty that how can we be anything but grateful? And “happy now.”

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.

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.

No Where

If you walk or sit in silence long enough, you blend with everything. You are no longer separate from the world around you, gazing outward, because there is no out or in. The mind stops grasping and relaxes into blankness. You are no where—because where ceases to exist. This is infinity. Some call it Presence or universal consciousness. It is pure awareness without parameters or definitions. Just being.

I sometimes find myself there when I am walking in Nature or deep in meditation (and once as I was coming out of surgery). But even there is a misnomer because how can there exist in no where? I assure you I am not trying to trick you with word games. I am attempting to move beyond words to the silence of the soul. Of course, you can’t really find your way to silence with language. To describe the process of becoming completely silent seems almost contradictory.

Yet perhaps it is not entirely impossible to offer directional metaphors, as the poet Rumi did in all his work. Recently, a friend commented that the deep meditational experience of infinity was akin to being in the field Rumi describes, which is “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,” judging. Remembering the words of that poem immediately opened the door of Presence even further for me. A field that is empty of everything but shared spirit.

That is exactly how I felt within the depths of the profound silence of no where. Separation completely fell away. No opinions, no judgments of others, just awareness without any definitions or language to infringe on the vision of the soul, pure and true. Perhaps this is the purpose of all life: to reach that experience of being completely immersed in the silence of the soul. Because within it there is no longer inner or outer conflict, only peace.

We humans often talk of peace on Earth and aspire to it. Yet it seems to drift further and further away. Maybe that distance is an illusion, and in truth we are moving closer to it whenever we reverse our gaze from outward to inward. Because that is where peace lies, undisturbed and eternal. Our inner vision can direct us every day to living in a peace that radiates outward to all those we meet. In spite of the conflicts of the times we are now living through, more and more people are being catapulted inward by outer discord.

Our souls are guiding us in this direction, to seek the harmony and oneness that lives at the center of all creation. The no where within the where. Perhaps we came to Earth for this very reason. To experience the extremes of separation and then stand in the field of infinity, recognizing all that we see as one heart, one spirit. Humanity and divinity as one. Home at last.

All I Need to Know

I have always loved the phrase that many Native Americans use to refer to God and all of life: “The Great Mystery.” There is such wisdom and spiritual surrender in those words, a quiet acknowledgment that the universe and our place in it cannot be fully understood by the human mind. This wondrous mystery is what I experience when I walk alone in Nature or stare up at the stars at night.

Wonder, and joy at the beauty. Yet, for me there has also always been an element of sadness in contemplating eternity and my place in it. As a child I felt great fear when thinking of my life within infinity and the “world going on forever.” It was only in my adult spiritual quest that I came to a deepening and expansion of my awareness and a loosening of the fear. In “accepting what is” I found solace for my sorrow. When I stopped trying to find an explanation for life, the closed doors of my perception opened to the experience of Spirit, my soul’s essence and what is at the heart of all existence.

Even at times of emotional and physical challenge (the death of my parents; treatment for breast cancer), the presence of Spirit has sustained me. There will always be a mixture of thoughts and feelings when I look at the world that surrounds me: love of life as well as grief at its transitory, impermanent nature. When sadness arises, I have learned over the years that the wisest response is surrender: accepting those sad feelings and realizing they are only one part of who I am. It is my human identity that feels fear or grief; my soul witnesses all of life peacefully, without question or judgment. Within that peace, I let everything go and live in the Mystery. I don’t need to know all the answers; I just remain open to experiencing the beauty and wonder available to me in every moment.

I recently had an experience that highlighted this wisdom. I am an avid birdwatcher, and every year I visit Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the spring bird migration. Hundreds of migrating birds come through the cemetery because of its beautiful habitat, and local birders are there to greet them. On one particular morning, after days of rain, I walked inside the front gate and paused to get out my binoculars. A man standing nearby enthusiastically commented on the beauty of the day and how he was certain the end of the rain would bring all the birds in. I agreed with him, and as I started to walk away, he added, “I don’t know much about science or exact bird identification, but I know how beautiful and special each one is.” “And that’s all you need to know,” I replied.

 At that, he burst, quite loudly, into song: “That may be all I need to know….” He laughed delightedly as he finished and asked me if I knew the song. I smiled and said, “Yes, I do.” So he sang it all over again, practically vibrating with joy. We then wished each other a wonderful day, and each went our way. As I turned to look back at him, he was still smiling and singing to himself. What sweet synchronicity in encountering this rather eccentric earth angel who reminded me of the wisdom of life’s beauty. I am surrounded by that beauty with every step. And, truly, that is all I need to know, ever.