Dance was my way of praying, of listening, of celebrating, it was my way of being as beautiful as the life around me. Now I feel hideous, unloved, abandoned. I lie down and sob and I feel a screeching hunger for mil, for some essence to flow from the sky and reach down through my shattered mind and reconnect me to warmth and calm. And very gradually it happens. The life in the trees and grass and the warm rocks enters my body and joins me to them. One morning, I sit up and see the incandescent trees in silent communion with each other, immersed in love. This is the world, I think, the real world. Whatever happens to me, the world is still this luminous mystery.
If only we refuse to take our world for granted, we can detect something artful lurking at the heart of life, inviting us deeper into the world, allowing us to penetrate further and further into the Mystery of its creation, perhaps even promising us a new relation to everything we know.
Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist – an outer world and the mystery of the inner world – but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet ... as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.
Do you know how to make God laugh?
Tell God your plans. The journey of life
is the journey of walking into your mystery,
and, not getting there before God does.
For, there is a Mystery that many call God, manifesting as Universal Love, a set of Laws and a Great Process. That Process works through each and all of us, and that Process is perfect. As we discover this fundamental truth in the journey of our loves, we find that wherever we step, the path appears beneath our feet.
However I may be asked to be with a person, always I am tending to the birth of the sacred, to the mystery -- to the inbreaking of God in this time and space in this person's life. That experience is always new, always precious -- like any birth.
Delight is a mystery. And the mystery is this: to plunge boldly into the brilliance and immediacy of living, at the same time as utterly surrendering to that which lies beyond space and time; to see life translucently ...
~ from THE SAVAGE AND BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY by Alan McGlashan
If you could know that all the time the world would ever have is in the moment now in which you stand, that in your hand the future's bent and all the promise of the past's intent is held, would you not wait and listen and be still? Would you not let such mystery poured from unimagined source fill and fill and finally overflow the moment, until you, a living fragment of eternity, hear its measured beat and take its temp for your heart and hands and feet?
