Sunrise Sunset

In one of my favorite movies, Mindwalk, a physicist and a politician are walking around the magical island of Mont Saint-Michel in France. The politician is talking about all the challenges we are experiencing on this planet. The physicist responds by saying, “You cannot look at a single one of our global problems in isolation, trying to understand and solve it. You can fix a fragment of a piece, but it will deteriorate a second later because what it was connected to has been ignored. We have to change everything at the same time.”

The politician then says, “Suppose you are right and everything is connected to everything else. Where do you start?” The physicist says, “By the way we are seeing the world. You are still searching for the right piece to fix first. All the problems are fragments of one single crisis, a crisis of perception.”

What he’s saying is that the healing we long for comes in a shift of perception… from experiencing everything as separate to seeing we are all a part of an interconnected web of life  – rocks, trees, baby dolphins, human beings, soil, clouds, rain, the sun and you!

I believe we are ready to see this amazing adventure called life through new eyes. In a series of blogs, I want to share with you the basic shifts of perception that will open up your life and make a difference in what is unfolding on our planet.

I begin with the first shift by inviting you to acknowledge all the sunrises and sunsets you have enjoyed while living on this planet. Such beauty! But the amazing truth is – the sun has never risen and it has never set.

What do I mean by that? I invite you to sit on the moon with me and there before you, see this beautiful jewel of a planet we call home. As you let in the swirling dance of blues, greens, browns, and varying shades of white, watch Earth as it dances through vast oceans of space.

As it dances, it spins 24,000 miles an hour, turning, turning, turning. As it spins, watch it turn into the sun as light begins to move across the land in what we call morning. Soon, from your vantage point on the moon, all the parts of the planet you can see are flooded with a love affair with the sun. But as it spins away from the sun, watch darkness march across the land creating what we call night.

To continue to see this phenomenon as sunrise/sunset gives the illusion that you live on a fixed planet and the sun revolves around the Earth. This perspective creates a limited view of life and makes you more likely to be caught in your own drama, cutting you off from the truth that right now, as you are reading, you are part of a magnificent, cosmic adventure.

When you see life from this bigger perspective, it can feel so immense that initially, it may generate a feeling of fear. But if you stay with it, opening to what this view from the moon is showing you, you will know great awe, wonder, and gratitude. The more you spend time with this shift of perception, the more you will see there is nothing to fear. In fact, your world will become more spacious and filled with delight.

So I invite you at the end of the day to feel the Earth as it turns away from the sun rather than experiencing the sun dropping over the horizon. And if you can, give yourself the enormous gift of being awake at dawn, celebrating the return of light as the Earth turns toward the sun in this beautiful love affair called life.

If you ever lose sight of this shift of perception, in your imagination come sit on the moon and watch the cosmic dance of life and recognize that you have been given an enormous gift, the gift of being an essential and necessary part of this cosmic dance.