life is a gift | Dare Boldly

Breathe In Life’s Sacred Nature

We dance breathlessly through life praying silently that the meaning of our dance will not be forgotten in the breathtaking beauty of eternity’s endless embrace.

It is not the memory of our dance that makes it unforgettable. It is the wholeness of each breath we give and take that inspires our dance to flow joyfully in eternity’s endless embrace.

Left side of journal page – Life’s Sacred Nature

Embraced in the flow, we let go of having to make meaning of our dance with life and fall with grace into the beauty of our body’s deep awareness that this moment is ours to live with every breath, every step, every cell of our being present attuned to the sacred nature of life.

For our lives to have ‘meaning’, we must accept life has no purpose other than to be life itself. It cannot be anything else. Just as we cannot be a tree, or a bird flying on high. What we can be is in awe of the tree and the bird, honouring their presence by letting go of the thoughts that separate us from experiencing the groundedness of the tree and the flight of the bird.

Right side of journal Page
Life’s Sacred Nature

When we sink from our thinking brains deep into our bellies and all our being to be in felt relationship with the tree and the bird, we become one with the tree and the bird, connected, interdependent, irrevocably threaded into the weave and warp of life flowing all around us. Life where our presence is as integral to life itself as the presence of everyone and everything on this planet.

We humans struggle with this. We imagine ourselves as ‘separate from’ everything and everyone, as we search for ways to make our lives ‘have meaning’, as if there is some magical scroll high up in the cosmos upon which our purpose is inscribed waiting to be divined by some human act of will. Searching for answers, we tell ourselves we have to elevate our awareness high enough to rise into the sea of consciousness all around us as if our thinking is enough to take us into the divine mysteries of life where common sense will prevail and the unknown will become known and our lives will make sense.

Our lives are full of sense and beauty when we live with our whole body attuned to the wonder of the world flowing through us and with us and in us and of us in this moment, right now. Because right now is all we have.

The past is just a memory. It no longer exists and the future has not yet arrived. We are in the here and now where our purpose is to be fully present in the self of where we are in this moment, letting go of leaning away from living in the past and vainly trying to peer into the future. We are here to feel our entire being grounded in the deep, dark mysterious beauty of this moment, right now, even in the face of humanity’s often inexplicable nature. We are here to be fully alive in the moment, deeply knowing with all our senses, the mystery, magic and miracle of this life we are living right now.

We are not here to make meaning of life, life is its own meaning. We are here to live the gift of this moment, fully immersed in life’s sacred, majestic and mysterious nature. In this moment, how we dance nor eternity matters. All that matters is that we dance with our whole being flowing with the world around us.

Film-maker, Louie Schwartzberg, has been filming time-lapse video of flowers for years. The work, he says in his powerful Ted Talk, The Hidden Beauty of Pollination, is something he will never grow tired of. “It fills me with wonder, and it opens my heart.”

To be filled with wonder. To walk through each moment with my heart wide open is my intent every morning when I awaken. In the summer, I walk into our garden and marvel at the colour, the beauty, and the wonder of it all. How from a tiny seed set in earth, such luscious beauty can grow never ceases to amaze me. How a bumblebee can buzz around a flower, sip its nectar and go off to create honey is a constant wonder to me. I love to watch the Hops grow and climb up the wall of the garage — they grow so quickly I swear I can see each leaf unfolding! I love to hear the splashing of the water in the fountain, the rustle of the breeze whispering in the branches of the crab apple tree, the birds twittering at the feeder.

Time in the garden opens my heart to awe and wonder.

Yesterday, my beautiful friend BA sent me a link to view just the video from Louie’s Ted Talk. I knew I had seen it before so went in search of the entire presentation.

I’m glad I did.

In his words and through the beauty and wonder of his video, I was reminded once again of the incredible gift of being alive on this planet. I was reminded of how precious each and every life and life form is and of how we are all inter-dependent upon one another. How we are all connected. All breathing in the same air. All walking on the same earth.

We live on a precious planet. We live in challenging times. As I read of a plane being downed by a missile, of human beings being killed by one another, of animals being harmed by humans, of pain and desolation, destruction, and more, I can sometimes lose hope. I can sometimes lose sight of the power of life itself and forget about how precious this life is and what a gift it is to be alive, in this time, in this place, in this moment.

There are so many things in this world I cannot change, cannot undo, cannot prevent. But there is always something I can do to make this moment better, to create beauty in the world around me, to send out ripples of peace and love and joy and harmony.

There is always something I can do.

This morning, that something is to share with you Louie Schwartzberg’s Ted Talk so that you too can hear his words and watch the video he created. May we all take Louie’s words to heart:

“When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action. We depend on pollinators for over a third of the fruits and vegetables we eat. And many scientists believe it’s the most serious issue facing mankind. It’s like the canary in the coalmine. If they disappear, so do we. It reminds us that we are a part of nature and we need to take care of it.

… I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment. It’s the mystical moment where life regenerates itself, over and over again.”