A JOURNEY THROUGH RIVERS, TIME & ROCK

You wake up at 4:30 AM, light the small beeswax candle on your desk, and begin writing. As you write, the images present themselves, like stately emissaries from distant galaxies, bowing, speaking in low voices.  There is so much to listen for: the voices of friends who have Gone Ahead, the lyrical voices of Tomorrow and Yesterday and What Might Have Been.  In your imagination, you watch the rising sun wash night’s shadows from the sky. You hear the call of a Blue Heron. You remember that enchanted afternoon when you walked through Monet’s garden at Giverney. You feel the chill of the Alaska wind as you look out across miles and miles of ice.  All of this happens in your imagination. You hear fragments of songs, broken passages of music: Monteverdi, Ellington, Coltrane, Vivaldi. This, you realize, is the very center of the Universe, the place where Love lives, the silent, musical, dancing stillness, the secret cave at the heart of space-time where everything becomes One, and from which we depart in quantum ships that take us on all our journeys.

Here, at the very center of your silence, you discover and experience images of the love that lives its many lives through you. The lines of your many loves etch themselves across the geography of your memories and dreams the way the Colorado, century after century, whispers its swirling water-brushes along the walls of the Grand Canyon, painting in colors of dawn and sunset the history of rock, time and the river. You nod to these images, as you would acknowledge the presence of angels. You become still and receptive. Your listening is a prayer, a state of grace. You realize that what you are writing is a kind of a love story, and every love story is a journey through rivers and time and rock.  And every love story is a journey, with all the silences and mysteries of eternity weaving in and out of its shifts and changes like golden threads in a unicorn tapestry.

The Blue Heron casts his shimmering reflection across the waters of your life.  The ice cracks and spring  rivers start to flow. The golden celebrations of Vivaldi echo across an Umbrian landscape. Monet’s water lilies fade in and out of the sky. Great glaciers recede, exposing mountains and valleys that have been hidden in a mantle of ice for millions of years.  You see and hear all of this, and you feel reborn and new each morning, as your little candle flickers against the fading night.  Your silence is like a lover.  Your infinite silence holds you in its arms.