"Well.... how did I get here?" and other questions from the wilderness.
some Exodus image thoughts
At some point in your life, you will find yourself in the wilderness. And like David Byrne famously asks, “Well, how did I get here?”
The wilderness is a season of your life where all your identities are dissolved. Every object, structure, and title that you’ve hung the coat of your identity on falls to the ground of obscurity, and you’re left with nothing to hold onto. It’s a necessary disarmament from the survival narratives we have created that keep us from knowing our truer identity.
One question we ask in the wilderness is,
“If I don’t belong where I came from, where do I belong?”
The delightful teacher Thich Nhat Hahn has a spiritual practice called inter-being.
He asks,
“Can you see the Sun in this piece of paper? Because the sun shines on the earth which makes trees grow, and the trees are cut down and milled into paper. So can you see the Sun in this piece of paper?”
And so on and so forth. Can you see the ocean in this paper?
Can you see the logger who cut down the tree in this paper?
Can you see the inter-being of everything in this piece of paper?
In the wilderness, we are asked if we can see the Sun in us.
Can we see the ocean in us?
Can we see the cosmos in us?
Are we a stranger to existence?
Everything has been removed so you can see that you are a part of the inter-being of everything. You don’t belong to your situational identity. You belong to the inter-being of existence.
“… the whole of existence is mine…”
Sun
Stars
Ocean
Salamanders
Trees
Shrubs
You
This is your Exodus from thinking you need something extra to belong to the world.
Thank you for this succinct look at this passage in the desert. Personally I couldn't hold life, and a reason for getting up in the morning, together without knowing and believing in God's Love and Mystery holding all of us and all things together. Thank you again.
Wow!! Thank you❣️