The waters break as pregnant clouds let loose and shower the desert with cold and drenching rebirth. The river swells and bursts with life, the current rising as brown mud and silt slide over sandbar and gravel. Staunch in its power and resolute in its course, it envelopes the banks and swallows the thirsty grasses and shrubs.
The harsh summer of drought is soothed in this watery fall, the fever of the burning forests broken. The skies drip, scales tip, and the earth turns on a path toward wholeness, its blistered skin salved, its blackened wounds bathed with cool liquid.
I search the sky for signs of blue, the view limited by the outline of my tarp. My feet are cold, my pack and clothes wet, my perceptions framed against the background of my personal discomfort.
“Great Mystery, living and loving Earth, help me to move beyond myself and the confines of security and convenience. Let gratitude open my heart and expand my perception. May I gain the eyes of the hawk, the heart of the mountain, and the courage to dream a great dream.”
Clouds from a far-away sea are racing across the sky, their shape-shifting forms laden with liquid, life-giving blood. Rains fall and rivers are replenished as grand cycles of soaking and drying sound a slow-beating pulse through the body of Gaia.
Thirsty oaks drink from the sodden sand, their great, furrowed trunks turned dark from the drenching. Shaggy cedars twist in delight, releasing sweet-scented fragrance into the air that – scattering – mixes with mint, ponderosa, and piñon in a heady brew. I savor the smell, thankful as I breathe in the aroma of good medicine.
“Spirit of this Earth… You are so great, yet we are so small. From thee we receive, to thee we give. Together we share, and from this we live. Perhaps a picture requires a thousand words, yet may our prayers and simple thanks create a small snapshot, a gesture of gratitude for this grand gift of existence.”
Christ, Buddha, Moses, and Mohammed entered the wilderness. They fasted, prayed, had visions, performed miracles, and showed us a doorway between an ordinary and extraordinary life. Vision is grand, and vision is glorious, but vision is neither unearthly nor supernatural. Vision is a way of seeing, an offering of attention. It’s an open hand to the unknown, an availability to eternity.
Today, at this moment, miracles are happening all around and before us. Landscape and leaves turn color in the changing face of seasons, sunlight, and shadow, while millennia of geologic memory are etched into textures of stone. Porous and pock-marked from molten explosions… ochre-red, rusty iron, and iridescent… igneous, alluvial, and crushed conglomerate… smooth, polished, and rounded by riverbeds – the storm’s sediment scatters a million-piece mosaic on this modest stretch of riverbank.
The mountains are raked by landslides and rock becomes pebble. Gravel is ground into sand and soon to be soil. The earth feeds and supports the seed as it sprouts and lifts itself up in shoot, stalk, blade, branch, and leaf. The leaves become food, are swallowed and fashioned into flesh, metabolized in muscles whose movements slide pencils of lead across paper milled from memories of tree-trunks. Thought becomes motion and the markings that symbolize sound are entwined in webs of words woven from the wonder of it all.
The blood in my body contains the salt of ancient oceans. A billion years of DNA looks through these eyes to see itself, the maker and mother, the matrix of miracles. Galaxies, black holes, quarks and quanta… the stone, the river, the velvet tongue of mullein… the song of cicada, spines of cactus, and silk of spider weave together as clouds collide and a red-tailed hawk traces circles in the sky.
The infinite and eternal are here, right now, present in each moment. The oak lives through the acorn, and the acorn lives to become the oak. God is in heaven, and heaven is right here in the earth.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Spirit, you have made these eyes. Above, below, before, behind, beside – you are without bounds. I am within you, and you within me. I am God, man, and miracle. I look out and you are in the looking. I see you everywhere, and I am in heaven, for I am on earth and in love.
~ November 19, 2018
I experience a deep, abiding peace and joy. I want the same for you. Please explore the site and the programs offered here, and if you feel they could help you find or travel your path with heart, I’d be honored to help you.
Your gift of the written word is another inspiring characteristic that keeps me drinking from your well of wisdom. How grateful am I to have crossed paths with you.
Thanks Kevin… I appreciate your kind words.