Bowing to the Future

The tsunami of the heart triggered by my beloved’s need to exit this incarnation reminds me how valuable it has been to have spent so much of my life trying to grasp how the universe works.   

Not that I hold an answer that’s useful for anyone but me.  

The one I do have provides me the comfort of at least seeing the sacredness of things no matter how painful or incomprehensible they might otherwise be. 

Being born with a question mark at my third eye has made looking under the rug of “What’s going on?” a lifelong pursuit.  There is no finish line.  Answers always get deeper.  My heart continually attempts to transcend the shackles of ignorance, the mother of all suffering.  Whenever it’s even a teeny bit successful I hear it sing what is today the license plate on my truck: YESS.

I think it was the poet and visual artist William Blake (1757–1827) who said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”  I wouldn’t say I live at that address, but I’m sure familiar with Blake’s route to it.  That I’m not consumed by things like drugs or the rage of a killer (as I’m sure I have been in other lives) has more to do with God’s grace––or if you prefer, dumb luck––than anything else.  One result is that, today, as I experience the biggest heartbreak of this life (so far), underlying every other response is gratitude.  I’m being gifted with the opportunity to love that much more.

A dear friend recently sent an email of solace in which he said, “Remember, God is always with you.”  A beautiful sentiment, but one that isn’t quite true for me.  Not if he means God is my perpetual sidekick.  A sort of cosmic golden retriever.  For that to be the case, God and I would have to be separate characters.  God and Steve.  So far as I can tell, there is no Steve.  There is only God. 

Yogananda cautions it isn’t accurate for us to say “I am God,” but it is accurate to say, “God has become me.”  

Would I say to Pinocchio’s nose, “Wood is always with you”?  Would I say to the potter’s cup that holds my morning joe, “Clay is always with you”?  Would I say to the breeze, “Oxygen is always with you”?  They all would look at me as though I’d lost my marbles.

Same way, I am, in essence, a manifestation of God.  As is every other soul since God said to Himself, “Let’s liven things up.  I’m going to make some playmates.”  And since God is everything, those playmates could be only chips off the old block as it were. 

Our playground includes as many incarnations as we need to get the hang of things.  It is a bells and whistles hothouse.  In it, all we ever do, whether we know it or not, is grow our conscious experience of who or what we’ve always been.

As you can tell, I’m not wise enough to have more than the most simplistic story of how things work.  Thank goodness simplistic is enough.  It allows me to bow to the big fat question mark on the forehead of the future.