Seeing Holy

I have just been given the gift of this thought:

"Years ago, an image from the Sufis struck me and has guided me. Looking for God, they say, is like someone standing in a lake of fresh water and being thirsty.  It’s foolish to seek the sacred and the divine when we live in a world that is holy and saturated with divinity, if only we had the eyes to see it.  Black Elk, the Sioux mystical teacher, said that we need to see in a sacred manner.  It’s not that the world is secular and godless; it’s that we don’t look at it in a spiritual way."

—Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul:  This Fractured, Heavenly World (Spirituality & Health)

And this:

"By bringing a soulful consciousness to gardening

sacred space can be created outdoors.”

― S. Kelley Harrell (Evolver Social Movement)

A week ago I climbed Glastonbury Tor, a pilgrim eager for whatever I might find at the top of that mystic hill, the ley line passing famously through it, religion and myth celebrating there—along with a contented groundcover of sheep; but just as surely back home in the garden I've created (despite the lack of water, shade, the balm of English rain) I find myself daily in an equally sacred space.  Or do when I let myself be there fully, wholly, seeing as I should, with birds and plant life in my care, and pottery- and wooden creatures gracing it as well, strings of silk birds and copper bells, and all the colors gathered to light it.

My pilgrim's journeys with bottomless pockets bring the distant holy places near, up close and personal, and they remain in muscle memory filling me and my everyday spaces with the spirit that fills them.  I love them all—the ruined abbeys and the chalice wells, the arched cathedrals and St.-Martin-in-the-Fields with its well known music, Green Dragon Temple where I go to find silence and that old quintessential apple tree, the green cathedrals of the cottonwoods along the often dry river in Santa Fe, the little Zen stone on our patio the birds come to drink from, the blooming of a single purple flower, the shape of a leaf—and gratefully worship our lovely, saturated world.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Purple Flowers