High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Awe’

So here I stand, a consciousness broader than the horizon, deeper than the sky, focused through this little dab of protoplasm, wearing this coat of ego, standing on this pebble of a planet, staring at a star that’s 93,000,000 miles away.

How did this come to be?  All this life?  All this balance?  All this beauty?  Why do we make music?  Why do we love?

And amidst the vast, unfathomable mystery of it all, how do we become so blind that we take it all for granted?  So arrogant that we think we have the answers?  How do we get so lost that we lose our context altogether and forget entirely who we are?

How can we stand in the face of this majesty and feel anything but awe, but reverence, but thanksgiving and transcendent joy?

Oh, may our eyes and hearts be opened.  May the gift of wonder bathe our souls and set us free.

Stand in a snowy field at sunset beneath the sweep of the infinite sky, your boots powdered by snowflakes.  Watch your breath crystallize in the air.

Look! You are alive in the midst of vast radiance.  The same force that powers the sun is sending, right this very minute, warm blood to your toes.

How did you come to be here?   And to realize that you are?  And to feel the stirring of awe, of wonder, in the face of this majestic beauty?

Oh, we are so arrogant and foolish to think that we have cornered truth; our arguments and notions are so small.

And yet, we are alive and filled with wonder.  And the same force that orders the cosmos is beating our hearts.

There comes a moment when the light ribbons through the forest just so, when the smooth air floats gently above the fragrant earth, when the dome of sky takes on its deepest blue, that all the woods breathes praise.

The wild turkey calling from the brush, the deer nestled in the ferns and the ferns themselves, the ants and snails, the woodpeckers and jays, the asters, the mushrooms and toads all sing the song.

The trees reaching to the sky, and the fallen ones, the leaves turning crimson and gold, and the fallen ones, the ripe spores of weeds and the fallen ones nestled in the soil breathe praise.

The minerals and molecules, protoplasm in all its forms, the dancing chemistry, the vibrations of light both seen and unseen and all the sounds, the spring flowing underground, the earthworms and moles—everything, everything upon the earth, and beneath and within and above. it sings praise.  Even we who stand so still, rapt with awe and wonder.

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If it all fell apart tomorrow, if all that I cherished disappeared, all I believed proved untrue, still I would have to say Thank You for the beauty of an October Day.

Thank you for the miracles of grasshoppers and autumn fields, for the cycles of seasons so precisely timed.

Thank you for eyes that can see, a mind that can wonder, a spirit that can ride sweeping currents of awe.

Thank you for this day, and this path, and this walking of it, here, beneath dancing leaves in the warm October sun.

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When the Grand Yes saturates every molecule of air, when it paints the world in every direction as far as you can see, when you hardly dare breathe lest you break its spell, surrender, and give thanks.

When beauty is so complete that it dissolves every lie ever told, when it dispels every last shred of arrogance and melts every memory of pain, when it tears away all but the awe and wonder of being, revealing to you the central truth of your heart, whisper your yes, and give thanks.

This is the moment that love wrote.  This is its gift and its joy, all for you, all for you.  Sink into it with gladness.  Drink of its splendor, and give thanks.

A squiggle of purple flowers on the cart caught my eye.  Maybe it was the intensity of the color, or the energetic waves of the petals, I don’t know.  But all of a sudden I felt as if I were seeing the world through the eyes of Vincent Van Gogh.  It all seemed so passionate and alive.

“How many ways can you paint a flower?” I wondered.  “Or an insect, or a bird, or a baby, or a tree?”    Think of the countless variety of colors, of shapes and sizes even one species comes in.  This is no cookie-cutter world we live in.  It’s a veritable banquet of sensual delights.

Think of all the colors the human eye can see, the range of sounds our ears can hear, the vast array of textures and pressures we perceive, the fragrances, the tastes.  The countless variations astound the mind.  And still, what we sense is only one small slice of what’s there.  Whole worlds dance outside our senses’ capacity to perceive them.

I read once that when we pass onto the next dimension, we acquire additional senses and so perceive an even more complex and intricate world.  And as we move through eternity, we gradually acquire greater and greater capacities to experience the magnificence of it all.  Then, after billions and billions of years and a sojourn that wends its way through universe after universe, we’re finally large enough and strong and pure enough to see it all, and to see that it’s always new, always changing and never ever ends.  And so we erupt into songs of  joy that flow endlessly through all creation.

When I saw the tiny maple leaves, just emerged from the tip of the branch, I thought about watching one of those time lapse movies.  You know, the ones where you see a whole day sweep by from sunset to dusk in a mere minute or two.

I imagined a little maple seed, the kind that twirl to the ground like helicopters, settling into the soil, sprouting, enduring a winter, coming back taller and stronger each spring until today, it stood before me, a proud sapling, with its endless unfolding of new leaves.  Soon it would produce helicopter seeds of its own, and the story would go on and on.

It reminded me of an exercise I learned once where you travel back through the history of something to appreciate all that contributed to its presence in your life.  If you were eating an apple, for instance, you could trace it back to the store where you bought it and think about all the people who were involved in operating the store.  Someone ordered it; someone sold it; someone unpacked it from its crate and set it out for display.

Before that, it traveled on a truck that came from a distributor who bought it from an orchard.  The truck had a driver, who worked for a company, and it traveled over roads that were imagined and engineered and built.

The apple was one of dozens that came from a tree that thrived in the orchard, soaking in a summer’s sun and rain.  And before that it was a blossom that grew on a tree that produced a seed.  Someone bought the seedling it produced and placed it in the soil and nurtured it. Someone picked it and placed it in the crate that was loaded onto the truck.

And now it was in your hand, and you would bite it and think what a miracle it was and how crisp and juicy and sweet its flesh.  And it would nurture you.  You were the whole reason it came to be.  You and the owner and workers in the orchard, and in the grocery store and the builders of crates and trucks.  And the story goes on and on.

It’s a wonderful exercise.  It gives you a unique perspective.  It broadens your sense of the connectedness of things and leads you to appreciate the wonder of life’s endless unfolding.  And in the end, it leads you to the big questions:  How did it all come to be?  Where did it come from?  Why am I, a tiny life form on a small speck of planet in the midst of a giant and dazzling universe, capable of wondering why?

The variety of life forms, their shapes and functions and interrelatedness;  the harmony, the artistry, the mystery of it all:  Sometimes it simply astounds me.  . .

For 300 days now, I have been collecting photographic examples of the One Song Singing.  The name comes from “Uni,” meaning one, and “Verse,” a poem, a melody, a song.  And I realize anew that no one mind can ever grasp the depth of its infinity.  It takes all of our eyes, all of our experiences, throughout all of time for us to even begin to know its infinite ways and wonders.

I am looking only at the way it shows itself in the landscape and vegetation within a few miles of my home.  Beyond, countless worlds exist, an endless panoply of beauty.  And what lies within us is more astounding still.

Here we are, arrogant little bags of protoplasm, sailing through an incomprehensible vastness on a tiny speck of dirt.  And think of this:  we know that’s what we are, and we know that we are somehow something far more, too, and inseparable from the Grand Mystery that generates and upholds it all.

And we do not know its name or whether we will ever see it face to face.  But we know that we live, and laugh, and love within its embrace.  And that is the ultimate key to its nature, and to our joy.

“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.” ~John Milton

Of all the colors happiness wears, the one that sweeps us most deeply to its core is awe.   It bathes us in a kind of majestic silence, stilling our racing thoughts and opening our hearts in a glorious gratefulness for the sheer privilege of being alive in the midst of this beautiful, unfathomable mystery.

As it washes through us, awe both humbles and exalts us, and the only response we can make is one of thanksgiving.  And because awe is so linked to gratitude, gratitude is a pathway that leads us to it.  Practice gratitude until you feel it in your bones, and you will be transformed with reverence for life, and with exquisite joy.