Becoming the Question

 

New Year's Day Sunrise over the Bay ~ Angels and Elementals Abound

The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of some new thing; it is a long and painful return to that which has always been. These words by Helen Luke open the entry for January 3rd, entitled Unlearning Back to God, of Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening'. I'm writing this post from deep within hundreds of acres of rolling hills on the edge of the country where my family is participating in an annual week-long sufi retreat co-led by my dh. It is indeed a time for folks to unravel back to God, a time to cultivate the space to touch the tender umbilicus, mystery of our separate lives, echo and intimation of our interdependence.

There are many names for this Source...Atman, Inwardness, Ishq, Soul...for every lineage and lens there is a naming of this, a need to say...I am part of this...for to name is to claim. Our journey is to refind this luminous flower of Grace not by the external markers of identity, work, clothing, body size, socio-economic status, family role and so on but by feeling into our relationship with Mystery, with the Boundless and embodying it, by becoming the question, by living in service to the unknown.

I captured this poem last night...this tree with her stories of transience and vulnerability, and the profound gift of bearing witness to both light and to shadow and the compelling place where those two merge as a visceral and widening truth. More and more I'm being shown, not without difficulty, that beauty and pain and love share an ongoing and clandestine relationship, one always holding hands with the other at any given moment, each necessary to complete the other. And I'm coming to feel this relationship as an integral detail of God, fraught and tender and replete with Grace all in the same breath. The veil that obscures this realization is any number of filaments...culture, trauma, religious training, sophistication, sarcasm...and what dance will allow it to fall from your body? I drew a card...

Two of Crystals ~ Starchild Tarot

I'm struck by how similar it looks to the first photograph...the seeing of patterns is part of our innate desire to belong to something larger than ourselves, to feel ourselves as woven into the expansive tapestry of Love. And this card, traditionally the Two of Pentacles, often represents The Dance for me, a way of being the balancing point within any number of foci.

Here the large crystal at the top speaks to me of Source, of Grace, the womb of generosity, with the two smaller crystals being iterations of that abundance, that life force...no less magnificent, no less beautiful. Embrace it all, this card tells me, become the dance of inclusion in the midst of overwhelm.

The Sufis have a practice called zikr...which translates roughly as the perfection of remembrance and the remembrance of perfection. It is a returning, again and again, to the Source...in the same way each breath is a return. Conscious or not, we are always being carried on a wave of Grace...Mark Nepo calls it unlearning, I call it unfurling...either way we are a cellular longing bound up in remembrance, perfection is inside the seeking of itself. We want it because we've tasted it already. Here is his brief and lovely exercise for this day's theme...

Close your eyes and breathe your way beneath your troubles the way a diver slips beneath the waves. Now consider two things you love doing. Feel into what it is in each of these that makes you feel alive. Hold what they have in common before you and breathe into them feeling the grace spot that these dear things mirror within you.

Wishing you all good things, each of us holding a mirror up to God.