Early Spring 2019

Driving up the canyon with my husband to go climbing the other day, my attention fell upon a sign I had never seen before; something to the effect of  “Dogs are not permitted in Little Cottonwood Canyon.” The sign looked rather bright and shiny to me in the late afternoon light. I asked my husband if that was a new sign. He chuckled and said that sign had been there since he had been going up the canyon — since the 70’s. I smiled to myself, managing the internal ‘whhhooooaaaa’ happening inside me. I’ve gone up and down that canyon my whole life and have never seen that sign. 

But it has been there the whole time.

When we reached our destination, we set our packs at the base of the wall, geared up, and started climbing. After an hour or so (on about the fourth time I’d gotten something in or out of my pack) my attention suddenly fell on a small patch of green, growing on a part of the rock wall just above and to the right of my pack. It was a mass of tiny dark green leaves in the perfect shape of a heart, about the size of my open hand. After passing right by it numerous times, it decided to jump out at me, clear as day. I smiled to myself, receiving the message of love it was sending — and no doubt had been sending the whole time.

A few hours earlier, right before we left the house, I had been taking out a small earring and it flipped out of my fingers. Out of the corner of my eye I saw it hit the sink and I heard a ‘clink.’ “Damn” I thought, “It’s gone down the drain.” Not having the time to deal with it, I tossed a cloth into the sink to remind me not to run the water.

Later that evening when we returned, I got down to undoing the pipes under the sink (easy PVC pipes with screw joints, thankfully). No earring to be found! Did it get caught in the drain plug mechanism? I poked around. No luck. 

I sat down in front of the disassembled sink pipes, despondent. That was a favorite earring. I couldn’t lose it! Then my attention fell on the floor to my left where the bathroom tile met the bedroom carpet. Standing with post down was the little silver and yellow-turquoise earring, as if had been waiting for me all day. I could not understand how it managed to not go down the drain; the physics didn’t seem right. How had I managed to notice it, where it had landed hours ago? I picked it up with a smile and a wordless prayer of gratitude.

How much of reality we cannot see; that is hidden from us! It is remarkable to me that the older I get and the more I learn, the smaller the reach of my perception seems to get. I used to know how the world worked. But now, I’m far more aware of the infinite variety of form and of process and experience that is going on at every second on every square inch of this planet — never mind beyond this planet. It turns my mind to jelly to imagine it. 

There’s something else that many of us don’t notice except in special circumstances, and many of us have lost touch with completely — the Love that surrounds us all the time.

A few days after all that afore-mentioned noticing, I took a Sunday afternoon to drive up a nearby canyon, alone, to a conservation area where I’ve taken people on Medicine Walks for the last five years or so. It’s a place I’ve come to know well. But I’d not been there in several months. I had wrestled the time out of what my mind kept telling me was a busy schedule because I was feeling very much out of gas. Bereft. Small. Exhausted.

I locked the car, shouldered my light pack, crossed the busy road and started up the familiar trail.

When I arrived at the big aspen grove about ten minutes up, the whole huge grove of trees shouted burst out in joyful welcome. I felt a massive wave of love wash over me. It was powerful love, visceral, vibrating through my entire body. All the smallness and concern and worries I’d carried up from the city spontaneously evaporated.

Now I was walking up the trail in the company of trees and grass and sky and flowers, and such palpable, unconditional love! They had been there for months and months, waiting for me.

And for the next five hours, I sat in the company of a huge pine that smelled so good and whose massive roots burrowed down underneath my sitting spot. I made my home and sat and watched the leaves and bugs and clouds, and napped. I gave gratitude, gratitude, gratitude with my heart spilling open, at the same time it was burning with grief for this human condition of being both god and animal, both infinite and mortal, both vast and small.

I’d forgotten just how deeply I am loved by the world. How much we ALL are loved by the world. I’d forgotten the power of that love. I’d forgotten that this love expands me into my infinite self, as naturally as the sun rises over the mountains every morning. From my house, I see the sun rising. But the sun doesn’t rise. It’s always suspended in the vastness of space, unmoving. It's only from my perspective on planet earth that it is circling around, rising and setting, moving across the sky.

I’m always forgetting and remembering, circling around from my smallness to my bigness and back again. Though when I remember that I’ve forgotten, I can make a space for myself, I can allow my attention to naturally fall on the support and love and power that is already always there.