Here We All Are, A Sea of Humanity - Beautiful, Vast and Endless

Me and my momma, a little teary-eyed

I went to Idaho last month with all my sisters (there's 4 of us) because it was my mom's 80th birthday. My dad held a grand party in her honor at the community they live in. My mom had no idea she was the star of the show as her mind is almost lost to dementia. This trip was a hard one for me yet it was full of incredible beauty.

Beauty is always there amongst the pain if we look for it.

There was a moment I was sitting by myself at the party looking out into a sea of about 40 humans, all elders and all dressed in various shades of yellow as a gesture to my mom's favorite flower - yellow roses. I was feeling joyful, emotional, disheartened, sad and a little lost. Yet as I was looking out, I began to notice something, actually many things.

I said to myself, 'Well, here we all are'.

I began to reflect on all the lives of these humans, all the lives that we have lived in one lifetime thus far. All the cities and countries we've lived in, all the experiences of joy, confusion, happiness, heartbreak, illness, deaths and births. The people who have come in and out of our lives, the people who are no longer in our lives, and the people who have always been in our lives.

The ways we have grown and blossomed, and the ways we have withered. The ways we've felt guided and supported, and the ways we have been lost and confused. The ways we have flung open the doors of our hearts with courage, and the ways we have contracted and curled up in a cave to hide.

Here we all are, each of us with a glowing light inside of us.

A backpack of experiences held by each, filled with various tools that have helped us through life along with some stones that weigh us down a little (or a lot). We hold wisdom, stories and traditions, we hold woundings, drama and divergence. We are elders in our hearts and maybe even in our bodies. We are rich, vibrant and ripe, and we are haggard, worn out and worn thin. We are forgetful and we are remembering. Perhaps we are forgetting what we no longer need and are still remembering what we need to know.

Most of all, I sensed how utterly beautiful, vast and endless we all are. It was so breathtaking I cried.

I tried this again while waiting in a long line in airport security, looking out into a sea of humans with all their baggage (literally and energetically). It was so fascinating that I was utterly surprised when my place in line was suddenly up.

How we experience life depends on where we are looking.

 Sometimes we just need to soften our gaze so we can bring into focus the beauty that is here too.

Instead of fearing that things are going wrong, what if we practiced viewing the twists and turns that life brings by seeing it through a widened lens to discover what insight is awaiting our discovery and what new pathways are being offered?

A refreshed perspective might reveal that we are being prepared for the next step in our journey. Or maybe we are being asked to pause and rest, or to become aware of a repeating pattern, or to complete a cycle before moving forward.

Or it could simply be looking out into the sea of humanity and recognizing the beauty of the human condition and all our predicaments.

When we view life in this way, we make contact with another layer of reality, with the great mystery and the beauty of existence. We get to experience life in its fullest expression, in absolutely ALL its colors. We get to really LIVE. This of course doesn't mean we only see beauty.

It means we INCLUDE beauty. It means that there is beauty in EVERYTHING!

So the invitation to all of us, myself included, is this:

Remember the beauty in life, and see if you can let it be here, too.

Munaycha!