Only Everything
The buzzing of bees;
the rising of seas.
Thousands, illuminated—
worlds of pollen dance,
intimating, your heart:
its vastness.
Our life, this movement
from world,
to root,
and back again.
Light envelops you; again, you rise.
To meet it—
your task.
It will only be known
as everything.
The pebble lodged in my sandal as I paused to furiously flail my foot in an effort to remove it. The flies, of course, gathered in the heat of the summer morning, taking great interest in my now seeming stillness.
Wherever could I go? For all my walking, I am only ever here. Little pebbles and flies interrupt my mind and force me to remember that life is always a dance of forces I can know, and those that I do not. And what I do not know, I often experience as fear, frustration, interruption. My ideas about what must happen, or what I’d like to happen, make me view this event as alien, other, enemy. I hate the flies.
Something within this, though, calls out to me. What about the flies annoy me? Do I view myself as insulated from the world, able to live without perturbation? A wiser voice within me speaks to these flies lovingly, and still protects my space. Can I be this wiser voice?
Light is coming and envelops the day; we are called to be revealed alongside the world. And so, like those parts we do not know and fear as other, what the night has covered and kept revealed can now be seen.
✶ ✶ ✶
So it is with our suffering. Who is not wounded by this life? And yet, it is the last thing we want to acknowledge. To acknowledge it is to realize our meekness in the face of life. To see that the world does not fit neatly into our fixed notions of comfort, and that we are often called into a greater acceptance of this fact by our own pain.
The pain can be hidden or quite obvious, but either way, it is made clear in the way we move through life. Like the flies and pebbles, this pain often comes unbidden, seemingly disrupting our path. It emerges as a word spoken out of anxiety that wounds a loved one, or a sudden pulling away after closeness. Seeing the harm this causes, our tender hearts feel regret, sadness; we long to heal and be whole.
Sometimes, we may not be ready for the work required of us to integrate and heal our pain completely, so we learn how to live with it and make half-steps toward wholeness.
Sometimes, it comes like a cascading waterfall upon our hearts, and all we can do is stay conscious and witness the opening of old wounds as they unwind and resolve.
I remember, several years ago, after some spiritually opening experiences and a lot of time in psychotherapy, the unbidden sobbing and wailing that arose one evening, at the unlived life I had never been able to grieve before. It was not planned, and no technique could have caused its arising. Rather, it was the long and slow process of deepening and unfolding through my own mysterious layers that led to a ripening; ripening enough for the unconscious to reach out and show me what it had been patiently holding in its hands all along:
my wholeness.
✶ ✶ ✶
It is painful, and scary, and feels completely out of our control at first. And, slowly, we begin to invite this old pain in, even to see the sacredness of its place in our lives. Woundings become openings, and their disruptions are opportunities to increase our awareness and move toward wholeness.
Yes, the question becomes: “How can I love this?” instead of “Can I love this?” And that makes all the difference. We come to realize that pain is a part of this dance as much as our joy, and that we want to be whole; to be all the way alive. Mere anesthetization is not life. It requires our willingness to suffer with grace.
So we dance.
And sing.
And love, and cry.
Because every bit is worth savoring. Beautiful, even.
That was what struck me the most about my unbidden wailing years ago; amidst it all, I felt how indescribably excruciating it was, and I also felt how beautiful it was. All at once. They were both true. I could not reconcile one into the other, and I could not turn away from it. I had to meet them in love.
And in meeting them, the beauty and my tears were all the more, for my soul had longed for such acceptance. For such a meeting. To stop running away from the pain of life and the courage it takes to fully live it.
Because, wherever could we go?
The sweet smell of trees in the heat of summer,
the sight of the ocean’s majesty—
only everything is singing
of the wild and infinite
mystery.
You meet it,
again—
it shimmers,
with a thousand tiny
untold graces.
Yes, my love,
your heart is the world.
Your joy and your pain.
As vast as it is,
only everything is.
Natural Proposition
Proposition I:
This world is far more beautiful than our hearts can perceive.
Proposition II:
We are the world.
Proposition III:
All is Beauty, coming to Be,
even through the stony walls of tragedy,
and through the opening of our heartbreak.
As I open to the sky, the vast statement of the Universe’s grandeur leaves me rudderless against waves of wonder and hope.
If Beauty such as this so clearly is, then what are we as humans doing, when we could so clearly be tending this beauty, partaking in the unfolding of life rather than its destruction?
Yet, we are the world. Are we, somehow, part of the unfolding beauty of the cosmos, regardless of our conscious participation? Is this some undeniable part of a natural cascading of ordered events, as lawful as the water’s movement to the Sea?
What I’m speaking of is our place in the Cosmos, so seemingly disrupted by our own pursuit of comfort and pleasure that we have forgotten what true contentment is. And so we seek perfection, a state of idyllic being where there is only comfort, only a dullness to the world we live in—but there is control, or the semblance of it.
You see, humanity still lives, to a large extent, in an omnipotent fantasy. As intelligent and powerful beings, we have allowed ourselves to pursue knowledge and power immodestly, rather than to deepen our relationship to what is.
Perhaps it is too much to say we believe we are omnipotent—but we are certainly striving for it. It would be our insurance against the turbidity of life, in all its mystery—dangerous, beautiful, alluring mystery. And, as soft, vulnerable creatures, our search for this knowledge is natural.
It is natural because fear is natural. It is natural because love dictates our wish to protect. But it is also misguided in the sense that it never truly protects or insulates us from the world. Instead, it puts us at odds with it, seeking subjugation and control instead of relating, listening, co-creating.
✶ ✶ ✶
Leaves are patterned. Water falls in forms that indicate a profound mystery. Clouds form and roll across the sky.
When we pay attention, Order is revealed. It is only birthed, however, from the Chaos we fear. A Mystery runs beneath Chaos; an intelligence, a soul-like point of brilliance, more primal than chance.
Is this, perhaps, why nature is so healing? We find our longing for sense, for intelligence, for Order out of Chaos, met in the way trees shimmer with wind and sunlight—only chaotic beauty at first, but we soon sense its Truth.
I would say it is poetically true. It reaches us in a way, a space, beyond the constantly problem-solving mind that seeks comfort and safety. Light trickling down the forest onto skin, dappled like the night sky, is chaos that makes sense. It feels right.
Likewise, perhaps, from some higher vantage point (a perspective I cannot always attain), our human struggles make a beautiful sort of sense—even the ones where we are causing our illness, and the planet's destruction.
But I am human, and my vantage point is only as high as the mountains I can summit, and the quality of my sight is only as clear as my heart.
✶ ✶ ✶
For Oceans will rise and fall, and our Earth has been formed and re-formed, like the minds of those who seek to love more fully, more skillfully, more beautifully. And perhaps our death is not a thing to fear, but that which we must embrace.
It could be said that our pursuit of comfort, of safety, of security, is all insurance against death. Against a lack of control. And so we seek omnipotence in that light. To create something perfect, where we will finally have freedom.
But to do so, we must be able to meet our endless desires. That is the requirement for perfection. For humans, we constantly crave something new, and so we must live in infinite possibility, an omnipotent fantasy.
Heidegger said, “Death is the possibility of absolute impossibility.”
And we are afraid to die.
So lies the crux of our current cultural malaise. I know it well within myself, too. We cannot choose. Every choice is a commitment that necessitates the death of all other possibilities. In our desire for insurance against the uncertainty of existence, and to live in perfect comfort, we do not feel we can shut the door on any potential path. We want it all.
But wooded paths must eventually part. Our choice to try not to choose is just that: a choice. While those paths may meet again, far along, they travel vastly different territories—those who walk them are shaped differently.
Nature feels beautiful, right, resplendent, because it knows the direction in which it travels: wholeness, life. It chooses, again and again, to accept its conditions and adapt to them.
Importantly, adaptation is not control. It is relationship—harmony with mystery. That is our medicine, but it can be a bitter pill to swallow.
And so we find ourselves here, with our propositions in hand. You see, don’t you? This world is more beautiful than our hearts can perceive. We cannot know it. It is a mystery.
We are that mystery. You can’t separate us from the world.
And when you get that, when you really, truly get that, you see that all is Beauty, coming to Be.
Because there is freedom. There is choice. The world is wide open! It is just that often, in our thinking we are creating more possibilities, we don’t see the trap we are setting for ourselves. This too, though, is a strange sort of beauty.
And we do not know where it will lead. That is our first principle, after all.
I leave you with a poem that I feel encapsulates the endeavor I am on, and many other brave souls:
What is required of us in our time
is that we go down
into uncertainty
where what is new is old as every morning
and what is well known is not known as well.
That we go down
into the most human
where living men have vanished
and the music of their meaning
has been trapped and sealed.
What is asked of us in our time
is that we break open
our blocked caves
and find each other.
Nothing less will heal the anguished spirit,
nor release the heart to act in love.
—From The Sound of Silence, by John Baughan