The Necessary Rain

The sparking flame holds against the necessary rain.

—Robert Mason

The human and the being must reach an agreement with each other or there will be no peace for the life that carries them. The human in us must accept that it will never transcend this life into what its heart knows is eternal. It can feel and taste what is limitless but never stay there because being human by definition is to live here with limits. And the being in us, which flies like a bird, must accept that what carries it walks; must accept that while it lives in the sky, the life it is incarnated to help lives on the ground. Our being will always see more and move faster than our humanness, which must step over rocks and through mud. If we don’t accept this imperfect marriage, we will never know its gift. Instead, our being will break our body, insisting that it catch up, and our heart will drag us into impossible situations, insisting that the sun can fit in a thing as small as a dream. And refusing our smallness, we will burn the things we love along the way. Reaching this agreement between what is human and what is spiritual is the practice of meeting the world with vulnerability until who we are releases what we know.