The universe lives within me.
I can hear the remnants of dust and stars sweeping through the chambers of my heart.
A poem.
The universe lives within me.
I don't know how.
Or when,
Or where,
Or even why.
It's a conscious disorientation towards knowing.
That when my mind is weightless,
I can hear the remnants of dust and stars sweeping through the chambers of my heart.
When I gravitate inward,
Searching for my innermost being,
My eyes behold the silent hum of black holes and swirling galaxies.
And when I embrace the peace of stillness,
Allowing the planets and blazing stars to orbit around me,
I feel the infinity of the space within.
I am filled with 1,
000 Indian oceans.
Hundreds of fragrant fields of lilacs.
And every blinding glimmer of sunlight crashing off the water's rippled surface.
I am reminded of my fragility and consumed by a sense of awe.
This poem started to surface in me a couple of months ago as I was contemplating my connection with nature.
The line,
The universe lives within me,
Was the start of it.
And today it serves as the title that bleeds into the rest of the poem.
It points to a meditative experience I once had,
Where I found myself in complete stillness,
Sensing a quiet pull inward towards my center.
Then,
In a flash of insight,
I suddenly found myself surrounded by space and stars.
It was a very real experience of the universe living within me.
And of accessing it through stillness and attention.
This is a concept and experience that I am now comfortable with and able to accept.
But it hasn't always been this way.
In May of last year,
I wrote an essay exploring incarnational loneliness.
Capturing that painful gap between what I knew in my head and what I felt in my body.
Surrounded by nature and adjusting my rhythm to match hers,
I experienced a deep longing for connection that emphasized my disconnection.
I realized it was nature.
God,
Creator herself,
That I longed for.
I crave to be held by the cosmic rhythm of it all.
But I didn't quite know how.
Biologically,
I understand that I am nature.
However,
Spiritually,
In terms of our interconnectedness with all things,
I still feel very much disconnected.
A dam has been built around my heart.
Blocking the flow of the universe.
For years,
The river behind this dam has trickled like a slow stream,
Creating a reservoir of lax.
But now,
The river is picking up speed.
I feel its need to break through,
Scattering the logs in every direction to let the cosmic,
Connected energy flow freely.
This buildup is intense and deeply uncomfortable.
End quote.
I think it's one thing to say we believe something.
To say we are one with nature or that universe lives within me.
But it is an entirely different thing to feel it.
Last year,
I couldn't.
I understood the idea conceptually,
But it remained somewhere in my head,
Separated from the rest of me.
Fifteen months later,
I find myself in a different place.
Through therapy and somatic work,
Spiritual formation,
Meditation,
Reflection,
And countless walks in nature,
I have slowly learned to inhabit my body and pay attention to what is happening within and around me.
Somewhere along the way,
The dam began to loosen.
I started to feel the connection I had once only understood.
This poem is a reflection of that movement.
It is an attempt to put words to the experience of discovering that the boundary between myself and the natural world is not as solid as I once believed.
This miraculous body contains it all.
The dust,
The stars,
The darkness,
And the light.
The universe lives within me.
With warmth and gratitude,
Brooke.
