To Ask then to Live

If I focus on the mountain, the beautiful flowered sun is blurred. If I focus on the sun striking its reflection the mountain is blurred. So many questions. Where to put the focus the intent? And then the whisper - "capture only what your heart sees, worry not about the sight of the eyes."

"...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."  ~Rainer Maria Rilke,  Letters to a Young Poet

Thrice Asked

Alternating my  eyes, Kindle font at its largest, and the blurred dancing words read:

“A basket full of bread sits on your head but you beg for crusts from door to door. Up to your knees in the stream’s water and you seek a drink from this person and that.  Would that you could know yourself for a time! Would that you could see a sign of your own beautiful face. … If you could only see your own beauty-for you are greater than the sun! Why are you withered and shriveled in this prison of dust? Why not become fresh from the gentleness of the heart’s spring? Why not laugh like a rose? Why not spread perfume?" ~Rumi

I will not write with the voice of “we.”  I will ask only myself.  I believe in the key. I believe in the keyhole etched to fit the key. I believe in the door knob that turns when the emptiness of the keyhole is filled with that which was carved out. I believe in the door.  So why is it so hard to place hand upon knob and insert the key? I know so many other doors, their handles and doorknobs worn with the imprint of my palms.  Is the act reserved only for others, the great, the inspired, the beautiful, learned and perhaps holy? Or is it the fear of the unknown, untested, and what if, that makes me distrustful of the uncertainty and blurriness?  Leaving me to doubt the angel beckoning, ‘come through the door and believe.’

“Would that you could know yourself….. see a sign of your own beautiful face….Why not? Why not? Why not?” Three times he asks, three times I reply……………….

Hieroglyphics upon the soul

So many philosophers, writers of fiction, theorists and spiritual giants have influenced me.  Yet, when I ponder their writings, their insights I find common themes.  When I go further back I find the same things scratched in hieroglyphics upon cave walls or stone.  These authors have no names.  They are not included in college introductory courses.  They were, however, the precursors of thoughts and threads woven into me.  They are part of my tapestry.

Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and others argue that not only do we have an individual conscious, that has absorbed our unique life memories, but we have a human conscious that has recorded the universal memories of all humanity.  Throughout our human history we have all experienced life, birth, fear, hunger, companionship and death.  Common threads in the tapestry of all human existence. We have all sought greater meaning to explain the world around us. Many of the same creation stories we are told today are etched upon walls by those we would call primitive, not too dissimilar from “apes.”

Sometimes it is comforting to ponder that as I look at the moon at night and ponder so many things, that similar eyes, thousands of years ago, looked at the same moon and had the same feelings.  Other times, my shoulders sink and my little spirit breathes a heavy sigh. If after all this time the questions have not been answered, then who I am to hope that I can now?

I can “google” the questions in a well lighted room and retrieve thousands, if not millions of answers- they could not.  I can reach out to millions of people all over the world and ask for answers, they could not.  Some of the answers may resonate with me while others fall to the floor.  And then, I would surely laugh at myself, I am back to where I began, just another questioner with a rock in my hand scratching my questions on the cave walls of my soul.

And maybe that is the only answer I will get.  To be human is to ask questions, to seek.  To ask and seek means there is something inside me that expects a response.  Wrapping together the universal experiences of birth, fear, hunger, companionship and death is the awareness that yes, there really is something beyond me. Something will respond. May not be considered an “answer” but I will get a response. To get a response means I have been heard, someone or something listened.  Response means presence.  Maybe that is the legacy left to me by those huddled without fire, shelter, language as we know it, cities, or anything else we associate with “advanced.”  The first note ever placed in a bottle was in fact scratched on a cave wall  or stone- “We are not alone. Ask.”

Here I am

So why did I create this space, where none, one, some or many may see?  When I walk in nature, through the wind, mud, sand, waves, sun, clouds, moonlight, trees, beaches, mountains and mesas, I see beauty, wholeness, unselfishness, compassion, nurture, symmetry, cooperation and rebirth.  I see gentle and destructive power but neither is arbitrary or acts from greed.  I hear symphonies of rustling leaves and grasses and the timpani of ocean waves, energetic and vibrating life against my heart.  And I ask myself why my life would be different and empty of the same?  Perhaps you too have believed yourself excluded.  If so, this space is for me, this space is for you, a daily reminder to hear the whisper of inclusion, beauty, life, love, persistence and renewal. Snippets and ponderings, mostly ramblings, as I try to learn, heal, grow and live with my heart opened to life.  Not there yet.  Some days I’m not even sure I have begun the journey.  This space is like my little line in the sand, a flag, a lighthouse or even a starting line.  When one of us should stumble, fall to our knees in disbelieving despair, we will know there is at least one other voice, joined with nature’s eternal promise, reaching out gentle hands and whispering, “It is so.” Time to affirm the healing.