The more time I spend in the burn areas, reveling in the new plant life sprouting from the ashes, the more I'm reminded that our human sense of self is always a total gift, arising as though out of the ashes at each moment and then disappearing back into them, only to reappear yet again. Far from being a permanent reality that we might be tempted to take as solid and substantial, the self only comes to be as the Creator mirrors us back to ourselves, enabling us to become who we really are. Because this occurrence happens so continually, we often have the illusory sense that our identity is solid and permanent. But in reality, our identity is constantly moving in and out of existence and is thus always a total gift from the Creator.
For me, the natural world - especially the silence, solitude and vastness of wilderness - IS that mirror, enabling me to uncover a whole host of sacred wilderness qualities in myself as well.
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner puts it this way: "God IS our sense of self, our innermost essence, encountered throughout all creation . . . This means that this awareness, this sense of uniqueness we feel, cannot possibly have come just from ourselves. It is bigger than us and must be in everyone else. In all living things. In stones and water and fire. Everywhere. Indeed, this sense of self is so holy we correctly intuit that it has created us."
Photo: Bluebells sprouting in the midst of roasted wild plums, growing in a thicket of blackened bushes; Lory State Park; May 7, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment