Birth Canal

 

I reach out to God, to find God inside.

 

Hiking recently in the White Mountains, it was a bitterly cold and windy day.  There were several slippery inches of snow on the ground.  The trail was long – thirteen miles up and down – but not too steep except at end.  I wasn’t the fastest on the trail that day – several other hiked past me on the way up, on the way down.  And surely not the most confident.  I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it up until I did!  Despite my lack of confidence, fatigue, and cold, I put in a great effort to keep moving one step following the next for hours. And after a time, my mind began to empty of its usual ruminations, the things I worry about over and over again dissolving into the emptiness inside allowing me to take in the aliveness of that mountain.  The snow falling off its shoulders like an old woman’s long hair, like mine, the lavender overcast sky, the green-brown boughs of the hemlock thickly layered with ice.  I was glad to have made it to the top, to have that strength, stamina and focus. But it also really didn’t matter to me where I ended up.  Because I had already been granted the gift of presence with the mountain, it didn’t matter how far or fast I had traveled.

Life is always unfolding in this way at two different levels.  The horizontal which is our movement in linear time from point A to point B along the path of hopes and dreams, goals and expectations, failures and defeats. And the vertical, a timeless absorption in the moment that moves us inward towards the infinite depth of the soul.

You might have caught a glimpse of the vertical plane where time stands still and all your senses are open to the creative unfolding aliveness of a pure moment.  I have felt this most vividly when giving birth, massaging my father’s feet while he was dying, walking on the cliffs of Moher in Ireland. During these precious moments, the border of my small self vanishes as I became more porous, open, and integrated with all that surrounded me.  And at the same time, more deeply traveled inward to the abowd of my soul.

We mostly only experience the horizontal planes of life.  In the day to day, we feel time’s passing, as rush to do and accomplish all that is on the to do list.  Yet, even if we are unaware of it, life is also unfolding in the vertical direction towards the soul and the soul’s delicate unfolding.  This is happening outside of regular time, in the moment where the past, present, and future dissolve into the pure experience of being.  In this realm, we might become aware of our ancestor’s accompanying us on the journey with wisdom and comfort to share.  Or some sudden understanding of what is real and enduring comes into our lived experience.  In the inner depth of the vertical plane, there is enough space to understand paradox and mystery that is to big for the horizontal awareness to grasp.  We might have a new understanding of how our suffering has also brought us gifts of compassion and tenderness that we might not have otherwise come by.

On the cliffs of Moher, it suddenly and unexpectedly became clear to me what I needed to let go of and what I needed to cultivate for this second half of life’s journey.  My small-mindedness, irritations, jealousies, self-righteousness, and selfishness were no longer needed. While generosity, love, compassion, courage, faith would serve to connect me towards these qualities of the soul which are timeless and deathless. 

This bit of light at the cliffs of Moher came to me after an extended period of darkness.  Only in looking back and from the deeper self do I see the connection between the dark and the light.  During the times of my life that have been particularly bleak in a depression, a loss, a confusion, time on the horizontal plan becomes halted. There is a scarcity of hope, faith, energy.  A withdrawal from life itself.  Only after a long while have I been able to see how these fallow times were only fallow on the horizontal plane.  On the vertical plane, something deeper down in me was being nurtured into being.  During the dark time, something new was getting ready to change and grow, like the fetus in the womb readying itself for the birthing.

Knowing this helps me when the darkness comes again.  I know that in the darkness, something may be gestating in the vertical depths even as the horizontal path appears blocked, that a birth, a light, a transformation is readying itself.