Going Nowhere But Into Ourselves

Today's entry from Mark Nepos, The Book of Awakening, focuses on what he calls 'life in the tank'. He shares the story of a friend who set about to clean his fish tank and put his fish in the bathtub while he went about scrubbing film from the glass, cleaning the rocks and the filter, changing out the water. He returned to the tub astonished to find that the fish, though they had the whole bathtub to swim in, were huddled in a small area of the tub about the same size as their tank. Nothing was containing them, nothing held them back from being able to dart about freely...nothing visible, but clearly they had internalized the parameters of their daily living space. And so it is with us.

Having just come off a week of silence and song at our annual Sufi retreat, I'm very aware of the feeling of expansion at my edges and borders, aware of how the tank has enlarged considerably as it so often does when we give ourselves the opportunity to return to Source. I sense myself darting and swimming into the lovely reaches of my greening heart. And I'm also aware of how quickly this feeling evaporates. This morning's meditation was full and wide, juicy and resonant as a result of those widened borders. It won't always be that way because...mutability and all that...but for now the tank is large. I'm curious as to what it is precisely that has softened, what contraction has been loosened, what identity has dissolved ever so slightly. I want to know so I can be present to the ways in which it gets reified again, to better understand the process in which the idea of a self gets built.

The poet Robert Browning's words have been floating around in the background here as I've ruminated on this entry...gender changed for resonance...'oh, that a woman's reach should exceed her grasp, or what's a Heaven for?' With this poetic question in mind I drew two cards, the reach and the grasp, the everywhere and the somewhere.

Lumina Tarot

Well! This is a near perfect evocation of my own reach/grasp dialogue. The High Priestess, she of the boundless state, traveler of borders, edges and beyond, at home in the liminal, embodiment of binary consciousness...my reach. And what I'm grasping, what I'm holding close, taking shape around? The contraction and stasis of the Two of Swords. In this depiction of it I'm given the sense that this kind of inability to act is literally heartbreaking, seeing the blood on the swords dripping from the 'thing with feathers', from that which soars and ranges easily over the landscape of the soul, the body.

And here I come to a parting of ways with Mr. Browning...as I experience our reach itself to be Heaven. We touch the ineffable in our moving towards it. In that luminous, quivering moment of reaching there She is found.


 My hands moving towards what they love, it is the Body that allows me to do this, the beauty and grace of bones and sinew...flesh meeting flesh, my palms gathering in the folds of baby belly, husband belly, furred paws, rough bark, salt-drenched waves, tear-stained cheeks, soft lips...how can this not be Heaven...the everywhere named by the somewhere, Love spilling into and as Beloved.

...Your body is a Heaven 

arising as the ellipse 

of its own Earth, a celestial

bending of light. You are

your deepest intention.