I have lived for so long in the midst of so much stunning natural beauty that it has, astonishingly, come inside me and taken up residence. It had entered me without me fully knowing it. But I see now how it defines my inner landscape with its gentle contours, its hills and its valleys.
The living earth with its constant purification and renewal, its steady turning through the seasons, mirrors the expansive nature of the universe, the very fundament of the Great Mystery. As above, so below. Only good things happen when we work to restore our natural kinship with the Earth.
And when this truth is internalized, you enter a state of grace, and the floodgates of gratitude are thrown open. Thus, you become larger and more expansive, which means you become more human and more humane. This is the gift as well as the imperative for humanity to survive, “so that the People may live”. We must expand into our selfless selves.
Have you ever felt terror as the sun sets on another day? A profound and lonely sadness as the darkness gathers around you and your body is gradually absorbed into the night’s velvet embrace?
I cannot recommend strongly enough to stand in a circle for a full 24 hours without food or water and simply observe the wheel of life turning, both within and without your corporeal confines. Give yourself permission to have a soulful conversation with the Source, the Ground of Being. Find your prayer. Settle yourself. There is immense value in any meditation or stillness practice that allows you to be still in the face of all life’s challenges and ecstasies, its anxieties and uncertainties, to settle into being unsettled.
Ask yourself if you are living your largest life, manifesting your fullest expression? If you envy others what you perceive to be their good fortune, you have not yet claimed the priceless treasure buried in your own soul. It is that pure essence (“soul”) that remains after all the layers of translucent skin have finally been removed from the proverbial onion, to allude to a popular metaphor.
Once your inner landscape has been transformed by the defining feature of natural beauty, you will see it manifest in every person you meet. Not only are you living in a state of grace, but you also come to realize that you have always been living in a state of grace. You are living in the true miracle of life on this planet. A deep and abiding joy characterizes that epiphany, and it can even be shared with others. “Try smile” is a local expression that captures that idea.
You will begin to recognize the angels (and are we not all angels to one degree or another, even if only in potentiality?) with whom and through whom you grow and are grown. Think Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire”. You will begin to receive invitations to exercise your free will, as critical choice points appear on which to act or defer, to step up or step back. Often in the blink of an eye. There is no judgement in these moments. It is never a test, but it is always a choice. And a priceless gift. In this human realm, the rule of consequence holds sway. Life is your mountain to climb but you have access to as much help as you need along the way. No sane alpinist would attempt to ascend Mt. Everest without at least the help of ropes and crampons and climbing hardware, if not the support of sherpas and a cellphone.
I use the term “angels” for its poetry despite its laughable association with wings and clouds and pearly gates. A more prosaic rendition might call them “helpers” or “allies”, perhaps “daemons” or even simply “grace”. Petitioned or not, acknowledged or not, these “beings” stage regular “acts of intervention” in the lives of all humans. I am not referring to the timely arrival of the US Calvary or any other imaginary white knights descending from Mount Olympus. I have seen no evidence giving credence to any wholesale redemption tales. You must do your own spiritual work. And yet…..
If you have not consciously experienced the presence of these helpers anecdotally in your own life, I suggest you soften your eyes and gentle your heart. The perennial wisdom of humanity is replete with stories of such interventions, often on a heroic scale but also on a more relatable personal level. The fact that you are even reading these words is evidence that you too have helpers. I encourage everyone to get to know their true nature, the mechanics of which are legion. From that solid foundation, find your prayer and throw open your “doors of perception”.
Once you bear witness to such interventions in your own life, your relationship to the universe can shift from a hopeful fingers-crossed belief to the bedrock of empirical knowledge. And then you can know the true face of prayer. Intentional intercessory prayer is an act of neither faith nor hope, but it is an act of love. It does not matter to whom or what you direct your prayers. What does matter is that you are humble, sincere (you believe in whatever story works for you), compassionate (ie, expansive) and profoundly grateful.
No one knows from whence these angels appear. I have dubbed them as emanating from “guidance bands” in the space/time continuum (which, of course, includes your own DNA) but those are just words. The question itself is pointless. You might just as well ask why we were born. We just are and here we are. And we are not alone, a salient fact to which I have already alluded.
It is just as pointless to ask the meaning of human existence. I have spent a lifetime doggedly chasing that carrot on a stick, using the Sanskrit practice of “neti, neti” as my truth colander sifting through a plethora of teleological arguments. My conclusions pared down with Occam’s razor: existence happens because it happens. Any reference to a “God” (and his/her “nine billion names” along with all his/her progeny) is an “uninteresting answer to an interesting question”, to quote Hernan Diaz.
Not unlike the word “God”, the word “prayer” is unfortunately as loaded as the word “angel”. When prayer can be used to smite enemies or to negotiate membership in some heavenly host of false hopes, the statistic that 52% of the world’s adult population pray daily is very deceiving. In the shadowy world of semantics, whole universes can be lost in translation. Let us be clear with our intentions, but not toss the baby out with the bathwater.
Life is a natural expression of the body mechanism, which wants to express itself spontaneously. It wants to expand to be in sync with the energy of the universe.
The human body mechanism is highly evolved. It also embodies a highly evolved thought process that has the capacity to create a “heaven” or “hell” for itself, populating these dubious realms with all manner of entities, deities and demons the extent of which are limited only by the constraints of human imagination. These constructs, fraught with fear and ignorance, while providing moderately effective guardrails against the most inhumane behaviors, have also acted as an effective brake on evolution.
They promote a dualistic polarity that obfuscates the salient fact that we are all related (mitakuye oyasin) and that ALL life is sacred. Good /evil, light/dark are two sides of the same coin in the contemporary currency of the dialectic. The manifest universe is permeated by a slew of oppositional forces and is maintained by it. Think yin/yang.
The real dichotomy in evolutionary terms is between “aligned” or in sync with the universe (ie, expansive) or “going against the grain” (ie, contractive). This is all mapped in the stars.
The earliest humans were necessarily selfish and egotistical as a matter of survival. We should be glad they were. The gradual process of evolution over the millennia from selfish to selfless is a natural phenomenon that ensures our continued survival. But the pace of humanity’s evolution at this most basic level has sadly been inconsistent with its needs and has been overshadowed by a cornucopia of so-called accomplishments and advancements, some of great value, others “fool’s gold”. No fool, that Shakespeare! Blinded by hubris-fueled moral deficits, we still look outside ourselves (AI, the colonization of Mars, the arrival of the mothership, material wealth, magical thinking, a slew of Supeheroes to suit your fancy, a rapturous ascent into the elysian fields, etc) for salvation instead of humbling ourselves and returning to a sustainable kinship with earth. And with one another.
Humans have sadly not been keeping up with the expanding universe. We are still killing each other -and the Earth in the process-on a global scale in a frenzied pillage for water, food and land. And more insidiously, we continue to engage in genocide driven by fear and greed. It is as if the entire species struggles with arrested development, poisoning the collective well with its vengeful and hardened heart. It has clearly stunted our aspirations and compromised our most meaningful accomplishments. We desperately need to do better.
The Great Mystery, being the infinite inclusive container of all that is, provides ample room for all persuasions (theists, atheists, agnostics, satanists, nihilists, existentialists, whatever chart hangs in your wheelhouse) on the personal belief scale, including every story ever told about the meaning of life, even all the imagined heavens and hells. Such is the heady realm of free will. There are many tails trying to wag the dog, so to speak. But the dog is so much bigger than any of the tales that try to explain it.
One of the nightmare scenarios currently in queue on the human stage is life on Earth as a “living hell”, both literally and figuratively. Pulled blindly by the wild stallions of ignorance and arrogance, we have already begun our headlong descent into the Inferno through Dantesque rings of whelm and overwhelm. Our precarity in this unprecedented historical moment of looming meltdowns is so disorienting and shocking that a pandemic contagion of denial is not at all surprising. As well the unsettling socio-political fallout that follows. Evidence seems to suggest that a palpable apocalyptic zeitgeist has already permeated the collective. The aptly named Doomsday Glacier is but one high-profile harbinger of our future undoing.
I submit that what we have is a fundamental relationship problem, both with Earth and with the Universe. If I had to pigeonhole myself into a category based on my relationship with “all that is”, I would call myself an “Earth-centered Mysterian ” (not to be confused with the one-hit wonder garage rock band “? and the Mysterians” from the 60’s) since there isn’t any question at all about the defining aspect of The Great Unknown and Earth is inarguably my mother as she is yours. That said, I am aware that the very concept of “inarguability” in the face of empirical facts (the shape of Earth, for example) has today become as fluid as this floating world.
In full disclosure on a personal level, I am also a practicing Zen Buddhist and Taoist, which are essentially lifestyle choices (to live in balance, to see things as they are, to do no harm, etc).
My life is dedicated to refining and deepening my relationship with the Great Mystery as I follow the teachings of the Red Road so “that the People may live”. The cardinal points on my compass rose are purification, renewal, expansion and prayer. The wheel-mine as well as yours-is always turning.
My prayer is that you experience your life as truly blessed. Howsoever you may narrate your story with its myriad joys and sorrows, its seemingly endless hills and valleys, remember that all of nature conspires to uplift you, to make you larger, to help you to evolve from selfishness to selflessness. Allow your experience of the grief and gratitude that defines life to grow you larger into the expanded version of yourself which acknowledges that all life is sacred, that we are truly all related. Which self intuitively knows the necessity of nurturing and maintaining our kinship with Earth.
Become the prayer that you are.
May we all walk in Beauty, so that the People may live.
If I had to choose a hill to die on, this would top my short list. 
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