Diving for Buried Treasure

There are some seriously hard truths out there. Truth is hard a lot of the time. Truth is truth, it rips you raw and bare. It lays you down and shows you how you feel about what you see in the world. It makes it clear that you are not me and nor am I you. Which is too bad for us because you look to me as if you have it all figured out which is comforting to me and what I cling to when I feel like an ugly duckling caught in an oil-spill. And I know what you’re thinking when you look my way and I’m sorry friend, but you’d be wrong there. I cannot be your lifeboat, your guarantee for anything really. I know less than nothing all the while trying to figure out everything. I’m a master of disguise in the pursuit of understanding. I submerge myself into the thought waves of whatever my current obsession is so much so that I become unrecognizable to even myself. Eventually, of course, I emerge back up in human form but with a few curiously placed bruises and absolutely no recollection as to how I obtained them.

Experience to Experience I hop and I dive, feeling ever more crazy as I descend and ascend but somehow ever more full of the knowledge that I will come back to myself and actually come further and further closer to myself then before I set out. There is often this curious notion of ascension in spiritual practice. I have come to think of it more in some sort of aquatic terms than as any kind of mountaineering activity. Searching seems so much of the time as if one is deep in some seaweed ridden patch of ocean, grabbing one’s way forward, sometimes being forced to swim deeper and deeper down into the depths. But there is forward motion here. Always forward momentum no matter how dark and murky the waters. We will emerge victorious and lungs will fill again. We might be weary but we’ll make it. Eyes will sting from salt and the sudden burst of sunlight but they will adjust to see and help us back to shore before the ocean calls again. I am writing from inside the curl of the wave, I have been diving for quite sometime now; I've always been comfortable in water.

Take me, take me in your currents; I will learn your highways and grow gills so I can play longer in your benevolent wildness. Teach me of your sweetness and your strength. Life is playing itself out in the great drama of the tides, the ebb and flow, the shallow and the deep, the holy chamber of consciousness.