And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words...
As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word,
As if you were something you that could be looked up in the dictionary.
You are meaning.
Breathing in the mountain's late summer air, I lie awake at the campsite in the deepest part of night. My logical brain attempts to pick out constellations spread across a cloudless sky, but the mental filter used to make sense of the cosmos is still asleep. The names and designations slip off each twinkling pattern, until I finally give in to the vertigo of the unfiltered view. As I careen on this planet through space, the customary need for artificial celestial landmarks becomes irrelevant. I become aware of an unspoken certainty that we- myself, my tentmate, the rotating Earth and scattered stars- are exactly where we each need to be in order to serve and honor the other.
We spend so many resources filtering our view of nature through the lenses of miles traversed, calories burned, vertical gained, but how do we communicate the elation of frolicking exposed and vulnerable along a mountain shoulder? The data collected on my watch doesn't tell the story of you and me and our connection when we ran together through the forest in the rain, or of my fear when the wind at the top of the peak threatened to buffet me over the edge. It doesn't reflect the intoxicating experience of heaving lungs and thumping heart at the summit of my most difficult trial, or the excitement coursing through my veins at the start of a new adventure.
Perhaps it is ego and the fear of chaos that keeps us focused on the separate and small data points of our lives. Yet for a moment on the cool dirt in the night, I understand that there is no need for anything to be organized into constellations in order to feel important; there is no need for maps and charts to separate humankind from nature. We are living, pulsing creatures, each worthy of being honored as unique expressions of one existence, like waves in the ocean. We can give ourselves permission to let go- to abandon star charts, road maps, and career tracks- and allow our sense of wonder to guide us. This is not the way of chaos but of Nature, and the path of Nature is the path of movement... where beauty lies in in the uncatagorized and ever-changing.
Note: Opening quote by Alan Wilson Watts
Image: Sonoma ginko leaves, by Brittany Buckingham 2014
Further reading: The Ego and the Universe for BrainPickings