Greetings friends,
I hope the year has got off to a good start for all of you.
Today I want to share a personal insight that I received on one of my eight-day retreats that I found immensely helpful during challenging times and so I hope that some of you might find this image helpful to work with.
Some years ago I had the privilege of visiting Cozy Bay which is a beautiful natural coastal area just south of Mozambique and on one of these mornings we went to a stretch of river that flows near the ocean that had been recommended for snorkeling and from the surface this stretch of river looks like nothing special.
All you see is the occasional disturbance of the surface otherwise it looks like a normal coastal river but once you move beneath the surface with your snorkeling goggles a wonder world opens up.
There's a stretch of coral reef in this river that is home to some of the most exquisitely patterned tropical fish all dancing among the coral.
It's absolutely magical,
It's like moving through a vivid colorful dreamscape.
A few months later on one of my eight-day retreats I was coloring a mandala and I'm always amazed at how one can receive a fresh insight from the spirit when you work in that kind of creative way which is not normally how I work being quite rational and left-brained.
But at first this mandala just seemed to be a chaotic interweaving of strands.
As I was coloring I noticed a misprint on the paper,
A splodge of ink that was in the wrong place.
But as I looked at it in this kind of open receptive way that one brings to working with a mandala I saw that it formed an eye within a fish shape where two of these chaotic strands were crossing each other and suddenly my perspective shifted and what had at first looked like meaningless chaos became a wonder world of dancing fish and it brought back this whole memory of this beautiful aquarium below the surface but that one had no clue was there when you just look from the surface.
At the same retreat center on that retreat I noticed a mosaic that I had never really noticed before of two fish dancing just to drive the pointer and I'm always amazed on these retreats at the kind of interweaving and synchronicity that happens when we become quiet and attentive,
Opening ourselves to hear the wisdom of the spirit.
And from this emerged a really important invitation for me,
Which has been a wisdom guide for me for many years and continues to be that.
When I perceive life to be chaotic and meaningless the invitation is to move deeper than the surface level,
Entrusting myself to the holding of the water and what at first looks like a disturbance turns out to all be part of the creative divine dance and this dance is always calling to us to move deeper,
To let go of that surface perspective with all of its woe and disturbance and to recognize the beauty that we can participate in with effortless surrender.
When I remember this invitation and sometimes I don't,
But when I do remember,
Even my most difficult emotions and heavy stories can be seen to be these dancing fish with their invitation,
Come deeper.
The invitation is not to banish the difficulty but to find the depths and the spacious perspective beneath the surface which utterly transforms my perspective on it all.
Going back to the snorkeling experience at Cozy Bay,
The river has a continual flow and so all one has to do is allow yourself to be carried by the current and then you effortlessly move through this exquisite natural aquarium and I love this as an analogy of what happens when we move deeper beneath the surface of life.
We find that we are held in the water and enter the flow,
The flow of God,
The flow of grace,
No struggle,
It's effortless.
All we need to do is surrender to that flow and when we ease into the flow of life,
The flow of the divine,
We can join this divine dance.
Our work in the world becomes a light and life-giving participation in the flow of love which is all that's really going on all the time and that's what we're invited to flow with,
To dance with,
To move with the buoyancy of the spirit as we allow ourselves to be moved by the unforced rhythms of grace.
After recording that first part yesterday I realised that it would be helpful to give a personal illustration so I'm inserting this into that recording.
My brain seems to think that 2 or 3 am is a good time to try to work out the big questions in life so I wake up at night haunted by the questions of what the meaning of it all is and what my role is and if I'm hearing correctly,
Especially in this role of spiritual teacher,
And I feel an immense inner weight from these questions.
And interestingly this reflection came to me at between 2 and 3 this morning.
But when I remember this image and move into the quiet depths,
The freedom I find is breathtaking with a light chuckle of relief and the awareness that any kind of meaning or purpose at the level of mind,
The surface troubled level,
Or the perspective of this small single person is far too limited a perspective and the pressure is too great because we can never know really.
And the shift involves a release from this heavy personal pressure that I put on myself with all of the chaotic mind speak that goes with it,
Which is actually just an ego guilt purpose disguise,
And I'm released into this vast quiet domain of surrender to the wonderful mysterious creative dance of life,
Of our dance partner,
Our beloved.
And this is too immense,
Rich and intricately interwoven for me to ever be able to wrap my head around.
But also we're invited in those moments into the wonder of the dance to participate with whatever is unfolding in this mysterious cosmic dance of isness,
Of the real.
Thomas Merton writes so beautifully about the cosmic dance,
And I want to end with reading a few extracts from this,
With the background accompaniment of Berlioz's Dance of the Silphs.
We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that dancing.
When we are alone on a starlit night,
When by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat.
When we see children in a moment,
When they are really children.
When we know love in our own hearts,
Or when like the Japanese poet Basho,
We hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash.
At such times the awakening,
The turning inside out of all values,
The newness,
The emptiness,
The purity of vision that make themselves evident,
Provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness.
The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast.
The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life,
The more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own,
The more we involve ourselves in sadness,
Absurdity and despair.
But it does not matter much,
Because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things or stay in the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.
Indeed we are in the midst of it,
And it is in the midst of us,
For it beats in our very blood whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose,
Cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.
