Little By Little

Last updated on: November 4, 2013 at 12:04 pm by Mark Nepo

Little By Little 2013-11-04T12:04:41-05:00 Mark Nepo

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With life offering so much depth and diversity, it’s easy to see the world through the color and feel of any one mood or experience. Under a cloud, the whole world seems gray. Up in the night, the whole world seems dark. But little by little, we have these glimpses that life is more than any one experience will reveal. It’s how we string these glimpses together that opens the window of circumstance. And then we begin to see how the Universe is stitched together. This piece is the stringing together of a few glimpses I’ve been working with.

LITTLE BY LITTLE

Some days I plod like an ant so focused on the grain above my head that the next step holds all of life, and I feel in the lineage of slaves pushing the next stone up an unfinished pyramid. Then, without reason, life opens and flows with an unearned ease that I can’t describe. When it leaves, like a breeze of Spirit, I feel renewed and certain that God is in both the moment of lift and the moment of ease. In the moment before pain and after. So I’ve given up wishing for ease and running from pain. Everything on Earth moves by this inching between ease and pain. It’s how we grow. And praising both, surrendering to both, accepting both is the work of love. Little by little, the way an ameba pulses under a microscope, the soul within a human being pulses like a faint star throbbing in place. Our spirit seems to emanate as our psychology constricts. The contrast makes us glow and shimmer. It’s useless to want to bypass this journey. For it’s only by inhabiting it that we chance to know Eternity, not as some far off place reserved for saints, but as the Numinous Delta in which the very marrow of life forms and reforms. To live in this unending dynamism, between being and becoming, is the path of transformation. More than finding Heaven on Earth, we are asked to release Heaven by living here on Earth.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a recent moment of ease and a recent moment of pain. What does each open in you? If your ease and your pain are extensions of your being, hands of your being, what might you build or lift with them?

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