The Dissolution

I married myself to distance.

An agreement. From the time I took my first breath outside the womb, I inherited the stories of my fellow humans.

The first days of Sunday School, I sat in the child-size chair while the teacher sat in the big one. She pointed to an image of Jesus, this looming being, and the rest of us below him, small. The holy was up there. I was down here. And to close the gap, I had to behave their way, as they taught us, and believe their way to have a connection.

That spilled into all areas of my life. It was as if everything I was doing, wanting, dreaming of was outside of my reach unless I did things the right way, performed the right tasks.

The desert was separate. Something I walked into rather than something walking as me, from me. The beloved, the mystery, the next sentence, the next breath, all of it out there.

This morning, the sunlight came up over the Catalina mountains the way it always does. Low and slow until the full rays cast their brightness over the dark desert floor. A songbird started first. Then the quail. Each and all together singing.

I stood on the back patio with my coffee, thinking about distance. Looking at the saguaros, it hit me after that first sip. Separation exists because I believe it does.

One seeing. One hearing. Not standing outside of it. I am noticing from.

Neville Goddard said it. The I AM is the creator, and we are not separate from that. Not a God out there, up there, sending grace to us from a long distance. The I AM, here, now, the very awareness reading this sentence.

Mary Oliver knew it, too. She did not write about nature. She wrote as the place where nature became language. The grasshopper was not her subject. The grasshopper was her, briefly, in grasshopper form.

I think about this when I sit down to write, and the words seem far. I used to call that the blank page. I used to say I was looking for the right words, as if they were lost objects in another room.

I am discovering that when I feel a distance from what I want to say, I am not actually at a distance. The words are not somewhere else. They are the very breath about to move through me. I invite. They come to be discovered.

The mystics point at this. The arrival is the only thing that has ever happened. Distance is a dream we keep having about ourselves in this life called reality. Waking up is not going anywhere, not getting to any destination. The journey we thought we were on, us having to learn lessons to get somewhere, is happening inside a stillness that was never moving. The traveler on a journey here to learn lessons was an illusion. We were never down here looking up. We were the looking itself.