I found this photo, in my favorite place to window shop, flickr photo sharing. The amazing artists, who populate the place with their color, genius, and generosity, afford me the opportunity to put pictures to the words that I spend so much time, devotion, and energy producing.
I wanted to direct your attention to this one, I am sure you agree with me, that it is transcendentally beautiful … the shades of gray, white, and black, contrasted with the spring green and the deep azure blue. The circular nail bed and the crisscross ridges of the skin texture, add dimension and depth. The soft defocused presence of the thumb resolving into the crystal clarity of the sphere, cause the eye to travel up and in some mysterious way… in …
The three small blades, one of which gently holds the bubble from floating away into the forever blackness of the background, and the oh-so-small world a-l-m-o-s-t recognizable – but somehow not – pictured in the bubble, create a sense of wonder and powerfully valuable uniqueness.
I feel that way today… held between a gentle thumb and index finger … suspended on a tiny sliver of living green, bound on all sides by a beautiful, but mysterious sphere of right side up and upside-downess, back lit by the emptiness of eternity.
I have, of late, been spending a good portion of every day contemplating my death.
It hasn’t been that I “decided” to do so, and it certainly isn’t the wishing to die that came out of the emotional trauma of my childhood and young adulthood, but more like a spontaneous form of spiritual waking meditation.
I have not feared death, in any tangible way, for a long time now… but I haven’t actively engaged it either. I think now, in the middle of my fifth decade, is just the right time to begin the slow waltz that will prepare me for it’s inevitable embrace.
The notion of it, comes to me in the oddest places and circumstances…
Yesterday, in the shower, I was rubbing soap along a washrag causing bubbles to jumble together and grow like froth at the edge of a fast moving stream, as they grew into my hand and the cotton cloth I held against the soap, into my head popped this idea. “There will come a time when this warmth, soft soap, pleasant aroma, and tender falling water will no longer be perceivable. A time when death has sealed my eyes and taken touch from me.”
I waited and watched the idea, as it moved through me and around me, and I marveled at how much it enhanced and elevated the simple process of growing and harvesting bubbles.
Sometimes, in no particular order – or discernable pattern, I will glance out my car window and capture a person in a still frame sort of image, doing something perfectly benign … like sitting waiting for a bus, or leaning over adjusting a bike pedal, or talking on a cell phone in the car beside me, and I will be struck anew with the recognition that they too, are traveling the exact pathway that will deposit them alongside me, at death’s door.
Look again at the picture … don’t you see that same mystery, in the deep blackness beyond the apparently life filled sphere? The fragile nature of our lives, that we live with such silly seriousness – the comings and goings, the useless ambitions, the terrible desires, the misspent time and the lost opportunities … the whole tale, told in that one arresting photograph.
Something that we cannot fathom has plucked us out of the deep unknown, placed us here on this floating sphere, and holds us worthy of the deep attention necessary to keep our slender green tether from loosing us back to whence we came. You can see the great tenderness it takes to hold that fragile bubble in place, between thumb and finger, you can see the great power humbling itself to be concerned with us … caring for us … holding us steady…while we build castles in the air, unconcerned with how fragile it all is.
Foolish I say, we are all so very, very, foolish.
We parade around with our notions, and beliefs, and problems, and concerns, and desires, and ambitions … meanwhile, everything that we think we know, everything we think we can control, everything we think we want is all just an image, locked inside a bubble, hanging on a slender strand, held by someone or something whose immensity is beyond our wildest imaginings.
I have come to understand that spending a good deal of time imagining one’s death puts everything we do, and every moment we breathe, into the exactly right perspective.
This photographs perfect depiction of the truth of our lives, should awaken in us the power and perfection of humility. We don’t know anything, in fact we can’t know anything … and still we are so perfectly cared for … that to withhold our trust, is tantamount to withholding our devotion, worship, and allegiance. Every single time we allow the smallest shred of doubt to creep in, we abandon, not just ourselves – but the divine as well.
Not long ago, I saw a post on facebook of a young family dealing with the recurring leukemia of their four year old. The father had posted that his faith was badly shaken, that he had prayed, his wife had prayed, their community had prayed, and yet his small son had not been cured or spared the difficulty of a life threatening disease. He had come to the conclusion that God had deserted him and his loved ones, having not brought him the cure he so longed for, he now wondered if God were even present in his life.
I can certainly understand and empathize with the young father’s anguish, his despair, and his doubts … but I no longer share his view of God as a dispenser of the fulfillment of our desires.
I imagine God exactly as the picture depicts. A gentle hand holding a lively and largely imaginary world, having little or nothing to do with the worlds comings and goings … and why, might you wonder, would my God have so little interest in my world? Well, mainly because He, or She, or It, is waiting for me to mature to the place that I can accept every single thing that occurs as being utterly and totally necessary. He, She, or It, is watching as I work my way toward the kind of total trust that accepts what is directly in front of me, without opinion, intrusion, or judgment.
Waiting for me to see the long view, waiting for me to recognize through the embrace of death’s coming … that the real stuff is in that deep blackness, in that long beyond, in that long dark night.
I believe in that, and very little else.
I don’t know what “God” wants, what he plans, or what his purposes are, and neither does anyone else … I do know that I am held aloft, on a slender thread, by a loving hand … and that is all I need to know…
I came to that knowing through a great deal of self-created hell, until finally I was strong enough to stop believing and start accepting. Belief in all it’s many forms is a way of holding off that deep black mystery, a way of self-soothing that is designed by the egoic mind structure, to keep us from facing the reality of our brilliant but startlingly brief stay here, and the total mystery of our existence.
It is possible to end our dependencies on believing, and open ourselves so deeply… that we are willing to stare straight past the colorful blue sphere, and into the deep unknown.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king … so says the ancient parable. In a world scurrying around like all this matters, the one who has learned not to mind anything at all, is King. I am reminded of a story I heard of a great Indian Vedantic Teacher, I have since forgotten his name, but the story goes that after decades of teaching the ways and means by which peace can be acquired, a follower begged once more for his secret. After decades of trying to illuminate the minds of his followers, who at one and the same time wanted peace and worldly control, he finally said … “my secret is, that I don’t mind.” Not minding, is to say that Life flows through, in, and around me, with no resistance from me whatsoever.
To Not Mind, is to take everything with the same detached attitude that you might conjure up for nothing. To Not Mind, is to hold no opinions about the challenges we might be facing, and with equal commitment to have no opinion about the victories we have accomplished. To Not Mind, means to hold everything in your life, between your own gentle thumb and finger … viewing it all from the same distance and calm space as would God, giving nothing any greater significance than any other “no” thing, or event, or person, or feeling, or attitudes, or any of the other thousands of things we are surrounded and impacted with on any given day. To Not Mind, is to come to the centered core in which, I have no doubt, the divine rests at all times.
Leonardo Da Vinci is quoted as having said, “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” I too, have been learning how to die … for a very long time now. From the moment my heart quit beating, when I was undergoing surgery at 17 years of age, through the dark years of facing the desire for death, to the recent years of actively attempting to allow the death of the personality I once thought myself to be, to these quiet years in which I spend some portion of each day recognizing that physical death is drawing ever nearer, all of these years having been teaching me to die well, and by doing so, to live more profoundly than I could have ever imagined. To be capable of recognizing your life in soap bubbles is the birth of being capable of recognizing – at one and the same time – the utter smallness of your life, held between your own thumb and finger, and the Universal Spaciousness out of which you have come and to which you will return.
When next you are lacking the peace that passes understanding, when life has taken a turn you do not want, or wish, or desire, try putting your disturbance on a slender green thread, trapped inside a blue bubble, held at a distance by The Loving Hand … and remember softly to yourself, that the one who “does not mind” is King, in the world of the overwrought and despairing. And in this, you will have found “God’s will” for your life and with his will, the peace you crave.
Adayre R. Miller
4/30/11
photograph courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Svein Nordrum (Zen Roxy) to see more of this artists work, please follow this link: http://www.flickr.com/x/t/0099009/photos/nordrum/5669325242/
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