There is this little old lady puttering in her kitchen; she is busy tending to porridge on the stove, the steam wafting up and clouding her glasses, but she pays no mind and keeps stirring. Her hair is steel gray and neatly piled on top of her head. The red checkered table cloth is faded and a dried up rose stem is sitting crooked in a small vase in the middle of the table, most of its petals lying nearby. Soft humming can be heard as she goes about her business. The lacy kitchen curtains frame a small window that looks out upon a large yard. Her garden is covered in weeds as the old antique Apple Tree silently keeps watch, its limbs reaching out to embrace everyone and everything that seeks its shelter.
A picture of her late husband hangs on the wall and letters from grandchildren, great grandchildren. This kitchen is a warm and cozy place.
We peer through the pin hole in the box and watch, in awe, this old lady going about her business. She doesn't even know we're there. She doesn't know we can see her. She doesn't know she's being spied upon.
She acts as if she has no care in the world. She is content, existing within this small little universe that is her world.
So it is with everything. Small little universes existing within each other, then bigger universes existing within larger universes and forth and so on.....
I went out this morning to tend to the morning's chores. As I walked along the way I spotted some fallen leaves with drops of dew. I bent down to examine more closely. "How beautiful," I thought as I examined their exquisitely fragile and mottled structure, their once vibrant lifeblood of veins running throughout, and the precise spots where the dew had formed.
I didn't pick them up as they fell where they were meant to fall and disturbing them would disturb a lovely pattern, a lovely framework that I can sense... "that all is as it should be".
I looked up into an overcast sky and was momentarily spirited away as I savored the moment and bathed in the exhilaration of being able to view this lovely work of art--something so simple yet so grand as a spent leaf with drops of water on it.
Ah, but that's precisely the point.
For a brief moment, I was granted entrance into another universe...a lovely vista beyond anything I could perceive or know...a single, brief moment in time where all else faded away, as I was transfixed, entranced, by an art of flawless love-making more intense, more sensitive, more passionate, more demonstrative, and more creative than any mortal man could possibly fathom.
We take so much for granted, here.
If we could but slow down just a little and listen, we would be able to hear the many sounds of the universe conversing with us.
It is the chirping of a cricket, the luminescent rising of the full moon, a mother tenderly suckling a babe, the sound of waves rolling onto shore, that still small voice that enters your being and says...."everything is going to be okay."
Today there is so much disorder, chaos and confusion. Everyone is running around in a panic.
It's either "the sky is falling or is about to."
But if we look inside again, within that little box, we are transcended, transformed as our being is spirited away to another time, another place, where all is in harmonious, all is in order.
The mind is such an extraordinary thing. It is capable of healing, hurting, nurturing, destroying but it is also capable of oh, so much more...
We have not been given the key to unlocking its secrets...yet, as we are not ready for the depth of responsibility that will be required of us nor the infinite mind-bending exponentiation that will follow.
In the meantime, we must all be patient and continue our daily grind, no matter what it is, with the knowledge that we are indeed on the brink of something--a cusp of some sort, a turning point, a tipping point....maybe that long-awaited grand event in which mankind's incessant march toward self-destruction will finally come to an end.
And don't forget to peer through that pinhole every once in a while as a reminder that while things around you may not be going exactly the way you think they should, somewhere else, they are.
A picture of her late husband hangs on the wall and letters from grandchildren, great grandchildren. This kitchen is a warm and cozy place.
We peer through the pin hole in the box and watch, in awe, this old lady going about her business. She doesn't even know we're there. She doesn't know we can see her. She doesn't know she's being spied upon.
She acts as if she has no care in the world. She is content, existing within this small little universe that is her world.
So it is with everything. Small little universes existing within each other, then bigger universes existing within larger universes and forth and so on.....
I went out this morning to tend to the morning's chores. As I walked along the way I spotted some fallen leaves with drops of dew. I bent down to examine more closely. "How beautiful," I thought as I examined their exquisitely fragile and mottled structure, their once vibrant lifeblood of veins running throughout, and the precise spots where the dew had formed.
I didn't pick them up as they fell where they were meant to fall and disturbing them would disturb a lovely pattern, a lovely framework that I can sense... "that all is as it should be".
I looked up into an overcast sky and was momentarily spirited away as I savored the moment and bathed in the exhilaration of being able to view this lovely work of art--something so simple yet so grand as a spent leaf with drops of water on it.
Ah, but that's precisely the point.
For a brief moment, I was granted entrance into another universe...a lovely vista beyond anything I could perceive or know...a single, brief moment in time where all else faded away, as I was transfixed, entranced, by an art of flawless love-making more intense, more sensitive, more passionate, more demonstrative, and more creative than any mortal man could possibly fathom.
We take so much for granted, here.
If we could but slow down just a little and listen, we would be able to hear the many sounds of the universe conversing with us.
It is the chirping of a cricket, the luminescent rising of the full moon, a mother tenderly suckling a babe, the sound of waves rolling onto shore, that still small voice that enters your being and says...."everything is going to be okay."
Today there is so much disorder, chaos and confusion. Everyone is running around in a panic.
It's either "the sky is falling or is about to."
But if we look inside again, within that little box, we are transcended, transformed as our being is spirited away to another time, another place, where all is in harmonious, all is in order.
The mind is such an extraordinary thing. It is capable of healing, hurting, nurturing, destroying but it is also capable of oh, so much more...
We have not been given the key to unlocking its secrets...yet, as we are not ready for the depth of responsibility that will be required of us nor the infinite mind-bending exponentiation that will follow.
In the meantime, we must all be patient and continue our daily grind, no matter what it is, with the knowledge that we are indeed on the brink of something--a cusp of some sort, a turning point, a tipping point....maybe that long-awaited grand event in which mankind's incessant march toward self-destruction will finally come to an end.
And don't forget to peer through that pinhole every once in a while as a reminder that while things around you may not be going exactly the way you think they should, somewhere else, they are.
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