Physics of the Deep

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

There are spiritual physics that govern how we move from surface to depth and back. I think one is that experience wears or cracks us open, which can be painful and difficult. But most times, that wearing or cracking open lets something sweet in us out in the open, the way a coconut dropped and cracked by a storm lets its sweet milk drip into the world. This poem speaks to this.

I’m a big, old fish now, gumming

at the bottom, happy to feel the

light dissolve around me like sugar.

Each of our lives unfolds this way,

a sweetness dissolving over time into

all that it touches. Each of us: a hard-

ness carrying a softness, a determina-

tion carrying a gift, a thickness carry-

ing fruit. It’s hard to bear. And so, we

run into experience and each other:

to crack our hardness, to break our

determination, to get through our

thickness. Each of us destined to

shatter the container we live in,

so the sweetness can escape.

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a time when running headlong into an experience cracked your stubbornness or determination and what softer side of you came out.