A Moment, A Pearl
Notes from the mountain top…
What decade will you die? And in which moment? We will,
ultimately, slip from today into memory.
When spirituality is discussed, the subject of death
surfaces, as it must. I once passed through the wells of sorrow with the loss
of my father. I, again, traveled that jagged path with my sister. We each share
this common course. And, living long enough signifies the future prospect of
grieving the death of someone you deeply love. Sorrow will find us and will
offset our world. It is also in these moments, this interlude, when the
metering of time becomes ill-paced. Time is flat. It signals a time of deep
contemplation and prayer.
But while we are misled to think that death is
two-dimensional, I propose that it lives in a three- and perhaps multi-dimensional
space, not unlike your hand. Bear with me. While your hand has both a front
side and a back side, isn’t death also in a dance with life? Each the front-side
of the hand and death co-exists in partnership with its respective dance
partner. In order for us to live, we must also certainly die. In remembering
that the helix of life is rife with orbs of untold sorrow that we each brave,
recall that it also has spheres of joy that we mostly take for granted. Moments
of death brings contemplation. Moments of joy often brings about forgetfulness.
But they dance together, moment by moment.
When examining our lives, isn’t life but a string of
multi-colored pearls? Moments strung side by side? Grey with white. Silver with
pink. Life with death. Sorrow and elation sharing the same strand? Remember
that moments are as a verb in a sentence forming a paragraph in our individual stories;
we must take each pearl with love. Each moment with care. The dark with the
light. The subtle with the defined. The challenge for us as spiritual beings is
to rise up and to the outer surface taking each brackish instant, each moment
that we are afforded, into an opportunity to deeply love. Do this in every
moment and in every pearl.
