There’s No Going Back

 

Image by Valentin Saint-Jean from Pixabay

 

We’re never going to return to the way things were. We never do. We’re always moving forward, even when it seems we’re going backwards.

There are some things I’d like to be able to do again. I’d like to move through the landscape without worrying about the virus. I’d like to visit with friends in person. And I believe I’ll be able to do those things again, but I know it will be different. We’ll be different. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s how it’s always been.

The Buddhists say there is no “self” in the sense there is no “me” that is carved in stone. We have a sense of self, but that is a construct that helps us move through life. When we think this “self” is unchanging, is something solid, we can believe there is such a thing as returning to what once was.  

Once upon a time, we lived as though only our limited view of the world mattered.

Once upon a time, we believed we had become a colorblind society.

Once upon a time, we thought we could do what we wanted to the Earth and its inhabitants.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, things were not as they seemed.

And now we see, and we can’t unsee, unknow all that has come to pass.

So, there is no returning to the way things were. It’s just not possible. And I’m glad.

We may not see the way forward, but I’ve always liked and been unnerved when standing at the precipice. It’s where everything is possible. It’s where we’ll create new “Once upon a times.”

We Are the Weavers and We Are the Woven

Photo by Divyadarshi Acharya on Unsplash

The article below got me thinking about our bodies and souls. So often spiritually oriented people like to call our bodies vessels or wet suits. Those metaphors seem to dismiss the Oneness that I know many believe. The article helped me form a metaphor that feels right to me.

Read the article “A spider's web is part of its mind, new research suggests” first so you can see what I mean.

What if our souls are the spider and our bodies the web? Our bodies are an intricate part of our total being, more than just a tool. We need our bodies to have a human experience. Without them, like a spider without a web, some abilities are no longer there. There are simply some things a disembodied soul cannot do.

The physical realm has always felt like an extension of the unseen one to me. Not just a reflection. It is an extension of the Great Soul or Anima Mundi. We are souls within Soul and we are the web this Great Soul has woven to extend Its awareness and experience. Light extends from darkness. It moves like wind until it becomes almost frozen in time. It slows down and begins to take shape until it becomes something.

And we are always becoming. We extend our consciousness through our senses and even our sixth sense. We weave a web of awareness around ourselves in order to know and understand the world.

The soul doesn’t breathe, but it becomes breath as we breathe. It becomes everything as it extends out into time and space. Even disembodied, I believe the soul is always unfolding once it has become a specific point of awareness. And when it stops becoming, it is absorbed into the darkness, the womb from whence it came.

It all begins in darkness. It begins with a possibility. We are composed, constructed, woven. We come from deep within. We are song, temple, tapestry. We are compressed by our experience into a diamond that holds the light and sparkles like dew on the fine threads of the spider’s web at sunrise. Our awareness grows beyond some unseen horizon until we reach the point where it all began.