You Are So Much More Than You Know

Come sit on the moon with me and see before you your home, Planet Earth.  Move beyond the idea that you are looking at a solid, fixed, inert planet filled with animate and inanimate things.  Realize that she is a living process—a being that has been on a long journey to get to this point in her unfolding.  She was much, much different in her infancy.  Out of her gaseous and molten beginning, she has evolved into the awesome and extravagant dance of life we find ourselves a part of.

Now weave yourself into this cosmic dance.  You are the sum total of all of the creativity that has happened before you showed up on this planet.  To see this, lift your hand and look at it. Realize that it took life billions of years to bring itself together into a human hand.  At one time there were no hands on our planet!  First there were fins, and then webbed feet that allowed amphibians to venture out onto the land. But life wanted to be able to explore rocky terrains and vast plains, so the hoof and paw showed up.  They, too, are the ancestors of your hand.

Life then wanted to experiment with reaching out, touching, holding and actually picking itself up.  This didn’t happen until it figured out how to create the thumb.  Move your thumb around and comprehend the vast expanse of time that was needed for it to show up.  It is such a complex creation that it takes a greater portion of your brain to orchestrate the movements of your thumb than it does to orchestrate your entire thoracic and abdominal cavities!

Your hand would not be here without the entire chain of experimentation and exploration that has been going on for billions of years on this planet and beyond —all the trial and error of evolution which came out of life’s longing to unfold into the fullness of its possibility.

The same is true for you.  You are a unique facet of Planet Earth and have arisen out of the web of life.  You are not an isolated, disconnected person.  Just like your hand, you are the result of the billions of years of creativity that preceded you and your very existence is dependent upon absolutely everything throughout space and time. Take a moment and allow yourself to recognize that you are a completely unique and necessary thread in the tapestry of life.

And yet you, like most of us, are probably asleep to how amazing you are, and asleep to the creative flow of life.  And yet in this time of chaos (which always happens when life is shifting into a greater expression of itself) the life you are living is specifically designed to awaken you back into life and you are right where you need to be in your unfolding.  Your journey includes both the easy and the difficult, the joyous and the sorrowful.  It includes joyous times that you thought would never end.  It also includes times when you were unskillful, times when you hurt yourself and others, times when you thought about not wanting to be here anymore.  Through all your experiences, you are being ripened just as a peach is ripened on a tree.  Life is not always a likable process, but it is trustable.

As you begin to see that the safest thing you will ever do is to allow yourself to be the beautifully flawed human being you are, you can relax back into the flow.  You can also move beyond the idea that you are a man or a woman – even that you are a human being.  You are life waking up to itself.  Through your mind and heart, the sacred, intelligent beauty of everything can be recognized and celebrated.

So, bring your awareness into the place you are sitting.  For a moment move beyond thinking about life and truly be present for it.  This moment is brand new!  This moment is the only moment that matters in your whole life.  See it.  See shadow and light.  See all the varieties of colors and shapes.  Feel your body.  Rest in the great river of breath that has been flowing through you since you were born.  Let go of the holding in your belly, your shoulders and your jaw and allow yourself to relax into life.  Give yourself the gift of being present for your own spectacular life.