Monday, February 10, 2020

Our sunrise walk …

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Walking on the beach this morning, in the slowly disappearing darkness, it almost seemed as if the other beachwalkers I could see in the distance were slowly rising just like the sun. They almost seemed unreal, or non-human, as if they were aspects of the darkness that was gradually rising up into daylight. And then I wondered if that’s the way we sometimes feel in the early morning, like we are actually not separate from the newly arising glow of day, but are an essential part of the way sunshine and darkness endlessly shift and swap their powers. Sometimes we are darkness, sometimes we are sunshine. What I must do, I suppose, is settle into this eternal process and do both darkness and sunshine with thankfulness and appreciation. Like we beach-walkers this morning, I can rise easily and gracefully, over and over, from darkness into daylight into darkness into daylight, forever and happily.

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A special sea creature found by Delycia…

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Delycia conducting an experiment …

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A few faces in the sand …

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     On this sunny afternoon, as we were sitting on the beach under our umbrella, I noticed the sunlight making countless sparkles on the choppy water in the distance, and, if I hadn’t known better, I might have thought the sparkles were actually separate ‘pieces’ of light, instead of inseparable elements in a unified interplay of light, wind, and water. I might even have thought I could walk down to the sparkles and separate out and study one particular sparkle. But I knew better. I knew that the separateness of the sparkles was just an illusion, and that what was happening was an entirely fused and harmonized dance. There were no individual, separate sparkles, just a single, blended spectacle.

     And then I thought about how I almost always see myself as a separate, distinct, physical person, living my own separate life – and it came to me, once again, how great an illusion that is. The person called ‘Ham’ or ‘I’ or ‘me’ is no more separate than were the sunshine sparkles I saw this afternoon. Like the sparkles, I and all of us seem to be separate, but the truth is that all of us – all people, lions, butterflies, flying pelicans, specks of dust and stars above – are interwoven in a single, endless display called Reality. Thinking that ‘I’ could be separated out from this display would be as silly as me pretending I could separate one single sunshine sparkle and study it. The sparkles moved as one in an indescribably beautiful show, and so do I.