Watching birds in the ocean yesterday, I was struck by the connectedness of all things – the ocean, the sand, microbes, plankton, fish, people, all of it. I became aware of the universal consciousness, the divine thread that binds us all together. I watched the shore birds fluttering in the waves searching for fish and I thought, “Their life is my life, their suffering is my suffering, their pain is my pain, and their death is my death.” We are…
Last night while I was sleeping, I woke up very suddenly feeling exhausted and depleted. I felt strangely filled with an innate sense of knowledge and I thought to myself, “This is how the earth must feel.” I was so surprised by the clarity of this sensation even though there was some part of my logic-seeking brain that thought, “Don’t be ridiculous. The earth can’t FEEL anything.” In actuality, I think that is just the part of my brain that…
This morning as I was making breakfast, I thought the words, “I am in a universe of pain.” As someone who deals with chronic pain, I have previously thought, “I am in a world of pain” on days when it has been really bad. But today was different. For even though I was experiencing the most pain I’ve had in recent memory, I wasn’t using those words to mark or measure it. Instead, there was an immense spaciousness around it,…
It’s been a challenging week. I’ve been struggling to go at a pace that my body doesn’t like. Meanwhile, life around me is slowing down. The leaves are starting to fall, the garden is winding down, and even the weeds seem to have stopped growing. The days are getting shorter, animals are preparing for winter, and there is less energy all around. Mother Nature is getting ready for the long winter’s rest ahead. So why shouldn’t I? Autumn is perhaps…
Yesterday at work, I noticed a poinsettia plant forgotten and slowly dying on top of a filing cabinet. With sadness in my heart, I asked myself, “How could I have let this suffer so?” To be alive is to suffer, and to suffer is to be alive. There is no doubt that suffering is hard and sometimes brutally unbearable, but it is an inescapable law of nature. I woke up this morning cloaked in my own suffering. I thought to…