CYCLES OF BEING HUMAN

I am “driven” not by epistemological concerns but by ontological ones. In other words, it matters not a whit to me whether I believe in God or not, for that is not the question. The question is: What is the nature of being? To be or not be, that is the question. But since I already am being here and now, in light of all the pain and drawbacks and physical deterioration, I am more concerned with being alive in this body, though I realize that our lives, which include our ability to reflect upon our “condition” and state, should be used to consider and prepare for the state that occurs when our lives are done.

          I so often speak of “the great river of sorrow” that flows beneath the surface of our being and our awareness, for some, including myself, all too often overflowing its subsurface containment and overwhelming us, even drowning us. But in my experience when younger as a “body surfer” in the waves of New Jersey and even California, I have been engulfed and swept under by many a giant wave that turned, twisted, and threw me into hard and rough surfaces beneath the surface, but always to find myself rolled and scraped up onto the beach, gasping for breath. In other words, I have not drowned, but have been ejected from the mouth of the whale, as it were (though that, admittedly, is a rather different story). Still, it feels as if you have been swallowed whole and tossed into watery darkness.

          At this point I am rather accustomed to the supreme sorrow that arises and rules for a time. I cry tears for the pain of the people in their hearts and their souls, for we all are rendered as one in our humanness. We have known wholeness and the brightest light as inherent to ourself and remember this in some way even as we seem to float endlessly upon a great dark sea perpetually waiting to swallow us and does swallow us, only to spit us back upon ourselves once more. In time we may become aware of this endless process or cycle of existence. The walls we have constructed around ourselves seem to protect us from a threatening, invasive world, but they also imprison us within ourselves and our world. The world is in us just as much as it is outside of us, even as self-understanding and divine love is within us. Our sorrow is real; we feel it to the bone, to the essence of our being. And, as painful as they may be, our own tears cleanse us; the sea that swallows us also purifies us, washing away the walls we have built around ourselves as if they were sand castles at high tide.