It is a bright, clear summer's day outside and the joyful sounds of
"I Know You Rider" fill the apartment. I will soon leave this domicile to go and greet the day, arms open wide, song issuing from deep inside the lungs and bellowing out the mouth.
Each day brings news of death. There is no escaping it. We are surrounded. There is no way to avoid it. Death hounds our ever step. But the forgetful neglect the fact that every step taken is a step forward, a step toward birth.
Everyone knows the birth of placenta and blood. Few know the birth that comes at unexpected moments, without the warning of nine months. The true irony is that this birth is far more significant than the first. Everyone knows what leaving their mother's womb means, for every last person on the face of the Earth has experienced it. Far smaller is the number of those that have had the other birth, when suddenly they look about at the world around them and realize they no longer are living in the same world they knew but a moment before. The greater shock is that they are still within the world they have always known, that it is not the world that has changed utter, but themselves. Everything looks different because they see with new eyes, with a new mind--a new person has been born, and in the moment between steps!
Between breaths, everything they thought they knew about the world around them has been turned on its head. They find that every assumption they took for granted has been false, that every last truth they leaned on for support is so much straw burned away before the light of day.
To many ears, this prospect must sound terrifying. But this is only because they have become so entrenched in their assumptions. To have any movement forward, one must loose the bundle of certainty. The only certainty one can hold tight to is that the breadth of human knowledge, compared to all that which is, is hardly enough to cover one's head. How can such a feeble scrap be expected to offer any sort of protection at all? One might as well be naked, and why not? Is that not how we were born the first time? So why not again? Wash the afterbirth of the womb off you so that you might step into the new life fresh and clean. To see, one must have clear eyes, and a clear mind.
It is not old men and women that we should strive to be--those people so set in their knowledge of life that it clouds all possibility. It is the newborn that should be our greatest example. To awake every morning as if it were the first time ever and see the world before us with those wondrous newborn eyes--that is they way of the journey of the spirit: that journey that encompasses all others.
