Eventually you see through the details that seem to comprise your life. The lovers, the friends, the roads, the jobs, the poems. The this and the that. You see how it all comes and goes, rises and falls, clarifies here and blurs over there. You see how on close observation edges and seams aren’t actually discernible. There is only this experiencing, which knows it is experiencing. It’s strange and lovely and luminous, the way the ordinary is when one is attentive.
We live now in an old parsonage on Main Street. The village around us is full of people. Dogs are almost always walked on leashes. A half mile that way is a river that whispers at night and by dawn floats through the field in tendril streams of mist. Just beyond is a line of hills, the far side of which appeared to Emily Dickinson. At night I dream of the old house and the old trails and my dogs, all gone now as if they really were just a dream.
Some simplicity and clarity attends when one realizes that A Course in Miracles is simply a course – a curriculum with a beginning and an end. You take it – you maybe take it again – you enter into this or that relationship with teachers and fellow students – and then . . . you shuffle along. Or stride maybe. Or not. God waits only on the end of waiting.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven . . . because you can find nothing else. There is nothing else. God is All in all in a very literal sense (T-7.IV.7:1-4).
Which Emily Dickinson knew all along, saying of Heaven’s locale:
To Him of adequate desire
No further ’tis, than Here –
And so it is, at last.
When one consents to know Heaven – to give over all hindrances and reservations that preclude knowing it, which is simply to no longer do battle with them, which is simply to see there is no self to direct any engagement with them at all, good or bad, right or wrong – then Heaven is simply what is because it always always was what is. Clear and fine, like corn tassels in a light breeze, or a crescent moon in a late winter sky, or a chickadee’s two-note spring song coming from over the hill . . .
Well, that is a way of saying it. There are others. Why shut up when you can cheerfully sing, however nonsensical and misdirected the song? For what else does one fall in love with chickadees? We aren’t getting anywhere because what we are is beyond coming and going, beyond singular and plural, beyond even subject and object. It’s this – this this – regardless of whether we can articulate it.
what we are together
can never die
never arrive
or improve or go away
who cares
if I can’t explain it
I can’t explain moonlight
in apple trees either
and yet the one keeps shining
on the other