Dawn Prayer II

This was written during a visit to family in southern Arizona, far from my home habitat in Maine. 

     Morning in the Sonoran Desert brings different qualities to my senses. In the dimness preceding a November dawn, I've heard an owl hooting, coyotes yipping, but mostly silence - until the insistent questioning of a Curve-billed Thrasher begins. The air is chilly, the sky huge and empty. In my morning practice yesterday, I reached down to touch the earth, choosing a smooth rock embedded in the stony and hard-packed ground to put my hands on so I didn't inadvertently get a little spine in my skin. 

I reached down through the rock in gratitude and said, 

"Thank you Mother." 

She pulled me down deeper and said,  

"These are my children, all these rocks, across the surface here and across this desert that you see, and those mountains there before you. These are all my children, these rocks." 

It was as if she pulled me in and let me see through her eyes.

And I said,  

"I see them now. I have not always seen them. I connect more with the living things, but I see the rocks now, how they are your children, how they've been raised up high in the mountains, how they're deep, deep in the earth, how some are shiny and sleek and others are rough, and how they all slowly, slowly give of themselves to become soil, how some are in streams and rivers with water flowing over them, how some are open to the wind, polished by sand blowing over them. I see them now." 

I closed my eyes and could feel the energy of the many -- the many rocks and stones that are the foundation and the offspring of the earth. 

With a stone in my pocket I carry this teaching with me, gratitude for a gift received in my dawn prayer.
 

Living in color

     There is a phrase I've heard often enough that it is at risk of becoming an eye-roller, but actually it smacks of truth to me: "We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience." Certainly the first part of my life was about the physical: growing up, falling in love, experiencing sexuality, having babies, nurturing life in our own children. 
An awakening to my spiritual self wove through all that, beginning I think with my longest canoe trip when I was 16, thirty-five days deep in the North Woods. I became adept at reading the inclinations of the water and sky, and the repetitive physical motion of paddling long lakes was a gateway to a contemplative mind, as I drifted in both self-awareness and selfless-awareness.
     Perhaps this is why the water-sky horizon is a magnet for my soul. Not the actual horizon - the line where my eye tells me the two meet - but the times when they merge. I find the merging profoundly beautiful and mysterious.

     My eye wants to find a boundary and interpret it as finite, even as I know a horizon is never a finite thing. But to not have the comfort of this trompe l'oeil - the line of separation - delights me because it whisks the rug out from under my mind and jumps me into the perceptivity of my soul. This is how I get closest to the experience of beauty. 
     For me, when I'm in the presence of profound beauty there is a longing to merge. It's like my body is the perceived horizon, the line between, the boundary of separation. My eyes are both the pathway towards beauty and the guard at the door: "look at that view!", "have you ever seen such colors!" - approach, admire, but don't enter. I remember standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time. It was sunrise. It took my breath away. It was truly overwhelming, too much for my eyes to take in, beyond comprehension. I almost had to turn away. My mind wanted to file it under "disbelief". And echoing in these words - comprehension, disbelief - is the nugget: for me, my eyes lead a well-trod path to the mind, not the soul. So I need to either trick my mind or close my eyes if I want to get beyond the horizon. 
     I could just stay on this side and appreciate beauty, be a physical being having a soulful experience. But that doesn't seem to be the fabric I'm cut from. Some of my deepest moments of joy have been when I've closed my eyes and let my other physical senses do the experiencing. It cuts out the middleman of my mind. I don't just appreciate beauty, I swim with it.

Horizon photos from an old National Geographic.

     Those of us with beloved partners know this.
     And then there is music.
      What can I say: I love jam bands. When music is predictable, repeatable, it certainly can be beautiful and beloved in the way a familiar recipe or hiking trail can be enjoyed over and over. But it's the improvisational journey into unknown territory that certain musicians can lead me through that runs right over the horizon line of appreciating a piece of music and takes me to a place beyond where I can merge with it. These are extraordinary - "extra-ordinary" - experiences, and I'm so grateful that I've had them. They've taught me that there is something on the other side of the horizon. They've taught me that my physical being can support my spiritual joy. The whirling dervishes of the Sufi mystics know this; the Tibetan Buddhist monks chanting "om" for hours know this; whenever we get in a "flow state", as they call it, we glimpse this. Paddling for hours on a northern lake began to show me this.
     When I go to hear certain bands with gifted lead guitarists who plunge into improvisational jams all the time, I'm in heaven (which begs the question what is heaven? but that is another conversation). I close my eyes and turn my body over to listening and moving. In this way I entwine with the music like a lover. I can "see" the shape of the music; it has colors; it arcs and travels and rises and falls. My hands involuntarily follow the shapes like a bird soaring on air currents. My body moves in motion to the rhythm, the earth to the music's flight. It is as close to merging with beauty as I can get. It is glorious.

Walter Baxter / A murmuration of starlings at Gretna / CC BY-SA 2.0

     And so as I travel the cancer path, I somehow feel the separation between me and beauty - and love - is a thinner boundary. I weave back and forth across it all the time. Sunrise happens every day, and I'm usually there. An embrace, a kiss, a clear view of the Milky Way, the heartbreaking beauty of Jerry Garcia's jams on the Europe '72 "Morning Dew", a Mary Oliver poem read aloud before drifting off to sleep at night - these are all a hand extended and an invitation to merge, to not just be physical beings, to live in color.