That Which Abides

Why is Louie Schwartzberg's "Gratitude," the most popular TEDX presentation of all time? Why is it that medical and mental health facilities want to use it for healing? Why does one reviewer recommend watching it every day? Because it is healing: it is capable of causing energetic healing.  It can move the viewer energetically into alignment with Source--self with Self--with the glory and majesty of manifest Self.

We are entering the era of The Gift--or rather, the era of Awakening to The Gift. The world dines on this Gift every day.  Yet, at least in the modern world, it seems The Gift is not enough anymore (was it once enough?). It is easy for gratitude for this to fall away when the focus is on that, on more and better. Once the game of more and better commences, there must eventually (and continuously, ad infinitum) be Even More and Better Yet--with none of it, meanwhile, satisfying anyone to the core. 

"Focus on that which abides" comes to mind.  I don't remember when this phrase first entered my world. Maybe it was during Buddhism studies or meditation training and practice. Whatever its origins, I can tell you this: it's good counsel. 

But what is that which abides? Possessions, money, status come and go.  The heartbeat, the breath:  they last but a lifetime. It can't be family. Parents die and children go their own way. Or sometimes children die and parents go their own way. Not even the sun, at 4 1/2 billion years and counting, abides--not in the way that is meant here.  Even planets have a lifespan, albeit a relatively long one from the human point of view:  just like every other living thing, they come and go.

It is easier to see this ephemerality in insects or plants or flowers.  May features irises aplenty in my garden, then they are gone by June; June is for peonies, poppies, primrose.  The cosmos start their show in July, the dahlias in August:  you get the picture.  For some species, the flowering season is brief--as brief as a day, sometimes,  Other species will bloom and bloom until--well, in this part of the world anyway--the first good, hard frost. 

Creatures, structures, flowers, trees all come into being then cease to be.  Where do they come from?  Where do they go?  Good questions.

What gives rise to all of creation?  That which abides.  (Words will fail here, but I’ll use them anyway.  Call it upaya:  expedient means.)  That which abides is Life--the Life Force--Itself, which I call Love.  What gives rise to all of creation is Source.  Don't get lost in the naming; focus on the Thing Itself.  Source is Source; that which rises and falls (words rise and fall, you notice) can never be Source--source, maybe, but never Source.  

I am utterly astonished by the ineffable beauty, design, grandness, vastness, variety, elegance, order, and and and, of the manifestation of Source we call Nature. Seeing it captured and projected on screen in "The Beauty of Pollination" moves me to the point of overwhelm:  to tears.  I experience again, newly, even more dramatically (because it is moving life versus still life) the grand stirring that viewing my first close-up photographs of the Natural World caused in me. 

Life, my body, the earth and the camera all conspired to give me the great gift of seeing.  From the beginning, I have known and intended that the photographic images resulting from that conspiracy could serve to magnify, speak the evidence of the inherent beauty, freedom and flow in life, that they could serve as "vivid reminders of how well Love knows Its way and how well It does by us when we let It have it."  

 I didn’t have to look beyond my own body, my own back yard to see Love’s astounding beauty and bounty, some of which I've captured on “film.”  Love’s Freeway, Moving Art:  they exist to rouse the sleepy (or sleeping), to illuminate what might otherwise be missed.  They exist not to showcase pretty flowers, breathtaking sunsets, majestic landscapes or exotic creatures, but to expose the very soul of these: the dance and Dancer of which they are (and we are) all a part.  Love's Freeway's images, Schwartzberg’s stunning, elegant, grace-filled films can bring us present to The Gift, the bounty, the utter wealth of every moment--to our living inheritance endowed at birth, and to its Source.  

We needn't hunt for riches or labor to earn them.  What ever could we want when we already have it all?  When we already are it all.