I'm sitting on a stone bench that's perched high up on a hilltop overlooking a vast expanse of the Frio River Valley in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, witnessing a particularly spectacular sunset. Stunned into submission by the sheer magnitude of the breath-taking beauty sprawled out below, above and all around, even my Monkey Mind is being forced to take a break from his usual non-stop routine, being surrounded by such incontrovertible proof of the relative insignificance of human existence in the big scheme of things. Ahhhh, such peace...
FAR AWAY
Zet and I are very blessed to have been gifted with two days of unplugged bliss at the Wayfarer's Cottage, an isolated spiritual retreat setting located just a two-hour drive from our house, but at least a million miles away from our demanding work schedule, our sweet-but-still-challenging teenage son, our endless To-Do lists. Just a couple of hours into our 48-hour respite here, I can already feel a sense of deep relief: shoulders softening, heart opening, attention sinking down through my groin, into legs and feet, feeling their sweet connection to Mother Earth.
Leaning over, I pick up a flat piece of limestone that contains the clear impressions of fossilized seashells, a mind-boggling reminder that many eons ago, this high-and-dry hilltop where I'm sitting now was once part of a vast ocean floor. Mesmerized by implications of this rock and the incomprehensible scale of geological changes involved in turning this very spot from a sea-bottom into a hilltop, I almost missed that magical moment when the Evening Star first appeared. Very faint at first, then brighter, then joined by three more ever-so-faint twinkles sprinkled across the heavens.
HIGH ABOVE
Before I can even seem to catch my breath properly, this sparkling handful of jewels is rapidly joined by a dozen, then scores, then millions of other stars. Theoretically, a person with 20/20 vision can see no more that about 8,000-10,000 stars with the naked eye, even under the best of conditions. But it sure seems like I'm seeing millions of them now - when they were all completely invisible to me just a few short minutes of daylight ago. How can that possibly be?
For that matter, how is it possible that any one of those tiny little dots I can barely see could actually be a whole galaxy? That it might be as large or larger than the Milky Way, "our" galaxy, which is actually a fairly small galaxy, although it contains approximately 400 billion stars, each one of them a "close cousin" of our Sun... When I was a high school student in the 1960's, I remember being wonderstruck when my science teacher explained that there might be hundreds of other galaxies in the universe besides ours. Just three decades later, the Hubble Telescope unveiled the existence of 100,000,000,000 galaxies; while the most recent measurements seem to indicate at least two or three times that many, perhaps far more. Given that we didn't even know there were any galaxies until 1923, when Edwin Hubble first pierced our collective presumption that all those heavenly bodies were individual stars, the only thing we can be sure of is that we have still have a very limited view of what's really out there.
IN MY HEAD
Living as we do, in an increasingly urbanized lifestyle, where our houses, cars and shopping centers keep erasing more and more of the darkness with their light pollution, while covering up more acres of soil with asphalt and concrete, it is all to easy to take the few stars we can still see for granted. To dismiss the beauty, majesty and mystery of truly seeing the Earth and sky as being unimportant, compared to the economic benefits of destroying it. Yet, how can we stay fully grounded as humans if we've robbed ourselves of the opportunity to stare up in amazement at the infinity of Beingness raining down on us from the ever-expanding Universe? How can we claim our birthright, if we've forgotten what it looks like, stretching from horizon to horizon, far beyond what our eyes can see or our logical minds can comprehend?
Is it any wonder that we tend to scramble so diligently, trying to beat/cheat/compete for a seemingly shrinking pile of limited resources, when we've forgotten the importance of looking up at the sky and remembering that we are all rightful heirs to the limitless abundance of the universe?
IN MY HEART
But... now that the sun's been down for a while, it's getting mighty cold out here. Time to go back inside the cottage, warm up by the fireplace, eat some dinner. I push my hat down a little further, wrap my scarf a little closer, take one last look around, absorbing all the light, beauty and energy I can, while mumbling a little prayer to mySelf:
"May I remember to look up into the sky more often, to see what I can - and cannot - see. Wherever I am, may I be reminded that whether it's midnight or high noon, the sky is always full of stars, pointing beyond the limits of my perception, silently urging me to join them on the journey beyond boundaries.
May I reach down to connect with the earth as often as I can, and make physical contact with the fact that every single pebble, every grain of sand I touch has migrated to that spot from somewhere else in the universe at some point in time - a fact that my mind will never fully comprehend, my body will never forget, and my soul will never cease to treasure.
And may all beings be blessed by my willingness to remember and experience this.
With joy,
Rudi
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