Better Than Before

One night four Rabbinim were visited by an angel who awakened them and carried them to the Seventh Vault of the Seventh Heaven. There they beheld the sacred Wheel of Ezekiel. Somewhere in the decent from Paradise to Earth, one Rabbi, having seen such splendor, lost his mind and wandered frothing and foaming until the end of his days. The second Rabbi was extremely cynical: "Oh I just dreamed Ezekiel's Wheel, that was all. Nothing really happened." The third Rabbi carried on and on about about what he had seen, for he was totally obsessed. He lectured and would not stop with how it was all constructed and what it all meant... and in this way he went astray and betrayed his faith. The fourth Rabbi, who was a poet, took a paper in hand and a reed and sat near the window writing song after song praising the evening dove, his daughter in her cradle, and all the stars in the sky. And he lived his life better than before.
Jewish Folktale

Who saw what in the Seventh Vault of the Seventh Heaven? I don't know. But I do know that "contact with the world wherein the Essences reside" causes me to know something beyond my usual hearing, and fills me with a feeling of expansion and grandeur. Carl Jung talks about "the moral obligation"... the idea that we must live out and express what we learn in our decent to soul or ascent to spirit. What do I do with the gift of being breathed upon or touched by, "The One Who Knows"? What is my moral obligation? Maybe its fairly simple. Maybe my work is to show it, give it out, sing it out and live out my life like the fourth Rabbi... better than before.

A Place of Divine Revelation

I just got back from 5 days in Utah. I've been going to the desert in late spring for almost a decade. There is just something about it's call that I can never seem to resist. The ancients called the desert the place of divine revelation. It's that, but it's more than that. Life is very condensed in the desert. The roots of living things hold on to that last drop of water and the flower hoards its moisture by only appearing in the early morning and late afternoon. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes, "Life in the desert is small but brilliant". The desert is not lush like a forest or jungle. It is sparse, dry, wind blown and sun-drenched. It is intense and mysterious and most of what occurs goes on underground. I need periods of living a desert life: times of being small on the surface, but wild and intense underground. And I have to admit, wonderful things can come from that sort of psychic distribution. In the desert I am drawn to all in life that sustains me, I am drawn to the underground; that mysterious, lush and wild place of the soul. It is what happens there that makes the spectacle of the flower possible.

Awaken the Sleeping Spirits

The real work of this life is not what we do from 9 to 5. The real work is to allow ourselves to be who we already are and have what we already have. The real work is to be passionate, be holy, be wild, be irreverent. To laugh and cry until you awaken the sleeping spirits, until the ground of your being leaves and the universe comes flooding in.

-Geneen Roth