Maybe lightning or a bright flash or a burning bush or a booming voice from the gray clouds of heaven. Maybe touching the ground and a choir of angels enfolds you in white wings and crowns you with a golden halo like Buddha. Or perhaps, like Saul, you find yourself in a storm and a voice demands, “What the hell have you been up to with your life?” Better though is Gandalf, in Lord of the Rings, returning as Gandalf the White with a blinding aura around him mounted on his stallion, Shadowfax. Eureka! Enlightenment strikes!
However, my experience ranges more with the mundane drips and drabs of joy, tulips on a spring day, a “runners high”, elation at the sight of a rainbow. Though I confess I did once have a vision. It sounds too dramatic for our agnostic day.
Another time, I sat in a cold Scottish Cathedral, with the scent of wood and dust from the pews. Something awakened, ecstatic, quiet, focused, and immediate. I sat knowing oneness. The brief moment passed and life continued. I remember the Buddhist adage, “Before enlightenment, cut wood and carry water. After enlightenment, cut wood and carry water.”
Rumi says,
Your intellect is in fragments, like bits of
gold scattered over many matters.
You must scrape them together so the royal stamp can be
pressed into you.
Enlightenment has been more an alignment and engagement with the universe. Some days it’s there, some days not. Some days you feel like crap and pray and carry on. Some days you feel fantastic and on those days too you pray and carry on. Each day a gift.
I believe poetry—and all the arts—come from a divine grace: a Great Creator. Muse works too. Experience through that one individual shared with others. The artist is a conduit bringing congruence between the outer and inner and shared with another.
To the lover and visionary, it’s life as it’s being lived…
Being faithful is like the outside of a fruit peeling. It’s dry and
bitter because it’s facing
away from the center. Being faithful like the inside of
the peeling, wet and sweet.
But the place for peelings is the fire. The real inside is
beyond sweet and bitter. It’s
the source of deliciousness. This cannot be said: I’m
drowning in it!
Even while we cut wood and carry water in our lives, we should wake to the deliciousness. We commute, head into the office on a Monday morning and start diving into our email. We meet with clients, have committees, share ideas, deliver results. Even there, though the peel separates the inner and the outer, be the deliciousness of now, of life, of living. In all the universe, you are the only chance to be. Create a masterpiece living in the moment in a realization of experiences, be it a flash, a booming voice, or just the juices of a ripe fruit on a warm day.
(Rumi quotes fromColeman Barks, The Soul of Rumi)