So how do we live fully? How do we withstand and inhabit the paradox of feeling? How do we endure the terrible knowledge that life is fragile and uncertain and still experience the immanent Ground of All Being?

I’m not sure. I’m only trying myself, each of us a tiny will striving to find and ride the Universal current without perishing. But faith seems crucial: the ability to stay connected to the Whole, to know, even when in the dark center of our pain, that somewhere there is joy and wonder. This is a hard bit of consciousness to ask for.

Yet, even failing, faith is possible. For even when suffering, the Whole goes on. And faith can be as simple and difficult as believing in the Ground of All Being when it’s too painful to see. Hard as it is to accept, especially when hurting, it’s the magic of acceptance that softens our pain. Such acceptance opens us to surrender. Such acceptance enlarges our view. By daring to feel what’s before us, we begin to drift like a broken boat and the sea of all there is begins to carry us.

Ultimately, each of us is born bathed in being and loosed into the world, into the paradox of feeling, to make our way; breaking and shedding, suffering and accepting; each of us like the mythic chien of China, an enormously colorful bird that has only one eye and one wing. Into the paradox we fall, needing to find each other in order to fly.

October Storm

OCTOBER STORM

When the most important things in our life happen we quite often don’t know, at the moment, what is going on.

C. S. LEWIS

We wake to an enormous rapping at the side of our house and there, the towering cottonwood whose milk pods dust our path in summer is almost with broken back in supplication to the wind and weight of twelve inches of snow. We have no power. No light. No heat. A symbolism for us we can’t brook for long. No power. No light. No heat. The entire region. Over 170,000 homes. They’re talking days.

Not only are we recovering from the latest medical lap, but all our favorite trees lie slain, across the watery snow. We lost our shadblow, those delicate three-day-a-year blossoms. All we can hear is the painful endless creaking of limbs that took thirty or forty years to ring and grow so that on May first or second or third, with ineffable precision each and every year, a beautiful little net of white could welcome us to spring.