When circling what is sacred without touching what is sacred, it’s all we can do to find the thread of what matters. Mostly the thread finds us when we least expect: when things are going well and a sadness comes to dinner; when finding a picture of someone you buried long ago and in their eyes is a softness you never knew. Holding what matters at arm’s length in order to dissect it seems like a personal problem, and it is, but it’s also a spiritual problem that has set human beings at odds with their gifts.
In the beginning, the gods interfered to occupy their endless time on earth until we silenced them, became them. Then it took another thousand years to find the god within. Now it is we who interfere to occupy our limited time on earth, we who pull apart everything we need and poke at everything that is not us, until we fall into the silence that restores what we have known forever but run from: That fame is no reason to do good, and fear, no reason to do bad. Our lungs breathe the sky in every breath. Our heart feels the sea in every feeling. The mind sees beyond itself when it stops insisting it’s the thinker. These acts of being have their own continual reward. If we can animate them and let the sky, sea, and all that is beyond us help us and inform us.
There is only one conversation. Each of our lives is a sentence in its story. Loving is the art of putting down our want to be the hero. Listening is the art of threading all the stories. Once threaded the light in all of us is opened. It is the light of all that matters. Drinking of that light brings us back to life.
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