The Existential Storm

Photo by Mysticsartdesign on pixabay

Each day passes into the next. As the Earth spins round, facing the sun and then turning away, a day passes. We put numbers on this and call it time, but it’s really movement.

Music moves us and in long pieces, is broken into movements. There is movement in stories as they progress and we call collective action for change a movement. And change itself is movement. It is the act of becoming something else.

And so the day becomes night becomes day. We come from light, become flesh and pass into other forms and into light again. We are ever becoming. We are the light of being moving through the Universe in this form and then that form and then…

All is movement except the stillness at the center of everything. What moves is born from stillness and so I find myself rendered still by so much passing. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting older and feel the passing more. Maybe there simply is more passing, more leaving, more changing than us humans have ever experienced.

Stillness is being. Sometimes we just have to be with what is. What is moving through my consciousness? What is moving through my life? I can’t know unless I’m still for a moment. Then it all comes rushing in and it’s like I’m in the eye of some existential storm. I see all that is happening and yet, if I remain still, I’m in peace and all I need to know rises to meet me right where I am.

I’m passing, too. I touch the stillness to know it’s okay. I let the stillness move me and having known it, I am able to pass into the storm, join the story and ride the feelings that come with all this passing away.

And day moves into night moves into day…

The Call to Rise

Photo by Andressa Voltolini on Unsplash

The sunlight rests on my keyboard and I’m reminded of all the things I’ve seen or read on how we all, all of the animals including us, are drawn to the rising sun.

I just saw a story and photos of a black bear leaning against the rail of a hotel patio watching the sun rise. I’m reading Normandi Ellis’ memoir, Dreams of Isis: A Woman’s Spiritual Sojourn. In it she talks of the Ancient Egyptians love of the sun and how they saw the baboons watching, almost worshipping the sun as it rose. They even built statues of baboons doing just that. Carl Jung commented on the baboons in Egypt as well. And in a two-story apartment I once lived in I watched mourning doves on the roof next door stand together facing east as the sun came up over the houses across the street.

When I get up early enough, I open the east-facing blinds in my writing nook and greet the sun. It’s as though we’re born for this moment, that we are born in the moment the first rays appear over the horizon. The horizon is a place of possibility. All of us beings on this planet recognize a new day. In those first silent moments we realize the sun isn’t only rising over the horizon, it’s rising within us. Our heart is a horizon over which the light of awareness and compassion ascends if we let it.

I highly recommend you wake early, face east and watch the sun rise. When you do, know you join all of Earth’s creatures in a shared act of awe. We share this. We are not so different across culture or species. For one moment, at various times on this planet, we all turn to the sun, we turn within, we open to a new day in silence. Though our understanding may be different, we all feel the warmth and renewal of a shared star. Even those beings that live beyond sunlight deep within earth or ocean, even they are affected by the power that moves us all. May we realize this and the infinite possibility of a new day.