One Thing

A gray languid day envelops this piece of prairie I call home. Alone. Today is no different than any other, solitude is a way of life. Its queer to label it in any certain way… some days are joyous and the loneness is a gift. Other days, like today, they are a prison with no walls. The physical immediacy to another human being is measured in many miles… the soulful proximity I measure in increments of emptiness undefined.

A withered heart, a tear-filled soul, a lost, spinning vortex undulating through time that is this day. In a cabin ten by ten, the wind howls through the cracks as if a voice is taunting my sadness. No rhyme… no clarity… only the rushing wind with its mournful sound. I struggle to hear the voice of reason that could pull me back to reality. Everything within me wants to drift out and surrender to the wind… to float high into the formation of Canadians battling head winds for a better place. Their perseverance is not my own.

What place is this I so frequently see? There, in some distant corner of my mind, is it her? Her, that illusion, that ancient love, that completion, or is it a loneliness wrought from yearning.

I knew her once. I held her too. And as quickly as she entered, she left. The void is surely her wound. Often in mindful moments of rational thought I see the beauty in it all, and then the hammer of paradox sets in… like this day. What meaning did it have in my journey this life, indeed, many other lives too. Ultimately, I know the journey is well mapped by something greater than I, and trust is its only tangible form.

Many years ago a wise teacher told me that we can see a reflection of this map in nature. God as Mother Nature will speak to us if we only listen. On that pilgrimage in the Teton forest I saw Her and spoke to Her… that Divine Being. But the teacher said it will not be words, and indeed he was right. She spoke to me in a piece of drift wood I found walking along the Snake River. Two branches of ancient root had grown around a red stone. The single stone held tightly by the two branches spoke to me in such a profound way that it altered the wound festering in my heart. It said “you are two, but you are one.” The reality of NOW was not the absence of Her, for we share the same heart! The stone of ancient love will forever roll down the river. It will tumble and hone until its dust becomes the very particles of existence. And every so often it will visit the realm-of-now and sing a litany of meaning… a song of love. I heard it that day on the Snake. I retain the stone and its two branches seen above, it is a truth... a blessing.

There is another truth that spoke to me in this way and it is along the Stupa path at the Shambhala Mountain Center. It is two Aspin trees that grew side by side, separated by time and distance. Yet something innate within their exsistence desired the other. As Mother Nature spoke their verity they grew together. And as I stood under them I heard her voice saying to me “no thing, no time, no circumstance can separate the Sacred Lovers.”

On gray sad days, when howling winds call my lonely soul, I need only look to Her for truth. And if my soulful eyes are sad enough they will see Her… the sacred elusive love that shadows me all the days of all the lives I will ever walk. And some century, some wonderful, epic and cosmic day I will hold Her… and the limbs of our mortal days will turn that ancient stone into a single molten heart. That is my journey and my quest, noble and oh so sadly certain.