There are moments when I am in such awe, reflecting awareness of the sublime beauty in the world, that I need to take a pause. I fantasize about the apparatus that would be required to capture that moment: the sights, sounds and feeling. How can I share adequately the moment when the air has no temperature, when there is no discernable sound, when the smells don’t register, when, with eyes wide open, I see nothing? And yet, all of this is happening while I feel beyond my senses, before my thought can even be conjured, that I’m living an ancient truth.

You’re not peeking behind a curtain. You are looking deeply into Divinity. It’s not about comprehending. It’s about a heart-knowing. It’s a radiating feeling that takes your breath away while filling your lungs with possibility.

It’s not about good or bad, not about joy or sorrow. It’s about a purity of connection to a source of truth, big truth, beyond reasoning and metrics. The moment is about standing faithful, willing without a shadow of a doubt, to give voice to a dynamic that needs no defense or qualification. It is a harmonic of the deepest, lowest frequencies of the choir of ecology and cosmology at play. Where we are and why we are sound out an ancient melody of who we are.

…It’s about the quality of the moments that resonate, not their grandeur. They become bigger and smaller in the retelling, that’s the storytellers privilege. But the root, the ring, the sticky bit that makes that story worth telling is the absolute sacred truth.

I have experienced this as a child watching a swallowtail butterfly dance among the delicate blooms of mimosa tree wondering how such a color yellow could ever be more beautiful. As a young man building a coffin for a dear departed friend, I was struck by the sacred reverence of working in service. I remember one moment in a field on the Tuscan coast when my heart cracked open and I felt love so big that I was scared and full and never more peaceful. And even this morning, during one particular sip of my tea while reading my book, I felt a moment when there was balance in all things.

What are the practices that cultivate that listening? Certainly this song rings in the mundane as much as the miraculous. I’ve put myself all in on the bet that tea kettles and telephones make great bridges to the unknown as much as mountain tops and far away lands hold truth treasures for my soul.

But the question still remains. What does a life look like that is open to these subtle and grand moments of connection? I didn’t know when they were coming, and yet each one prepares me to go deeper the next time.

Who am I becoming? How is that becoming in service of the song I’m already a part of? How do I share that in the world?