Week 1, Day 1 prompt
Humanity and Divinity Spiral Dancing in the Field out Beyond Right and Wrong
From free-flying waltzes to mad tormented tangos and back again
Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about. ~ Rumi
My life is an intricate spiral dance.
It circles around and around while it spirals upwards in a mainly evolutionary direction. My humanness anchors the round and round part. My divinity continuously uplifts me.
Sometimes this dance is a free-flying waltz, soaring ever higher and higher.
Other times, this dance is a mad tormented tango, full of passion’s raw rage.
Because it’s rooted in Oneness, and in me, it shimmers with my singular beauty, with my divine light.
And when I am at the apex of my spirals, bathed in that light, the world shimmers in wondrous beauty.
I don’t see right or wrong.
Or maybe I see beneath right and wrong and things that have labels on their surface.
I have labels on my surface, too. My human surface.
Labels like 67-year-old middle-class retired single white woman. Labels like former leftie-commie-hippie. Labels like kyphotic, short, curvacious, sedentary, sleep-deprived. Labels like funny, mystical, writer, churchy, over-committed, stressed-out, generous with money, selfish with time.
Labels like slut, other woman, home-wrecker, recovering addict, and Higher Powered. Labels like lowbrow, highbrow, artsy-craftsy, well-read, arrogant, artistic, humble, crazy.
These are all about me. Grains of truth abound in every one of them.
But none of them contain all the truth or even all the lies about me.
Who am I then?
I’m like a diamond who started out life as a simple lump of coal and then went through years if not eons of hard, tight pressure to end up a rough and unrecognizable diamond.
But then, the diamond came out of the earth into the light. Divine light and life’s rough edges cut and polished her till her many-sided facets all shone, from her inner light. But also multiplied by reflecting that Divine light the way two facing mirrors appear to contain infinity.
Her facets still contain all that she is but are so far beyond each of those labels that they start to lose their meaning. They can’t easily be pinned onto her shimmering surfaces.
Nonetheless, they reflect who she is. They created the necessary pressure that transformed her from that simple lump of goal, like the fires that make silicone sand into translucent glass.
She wouldn’t have gotten to diamond-hood without them.
So, see! Everything has its place. It all goes into making me who I am now.
My Divinity helps me treat my humanity with otherworldly compassion.
My humanity gives my Divinity its grit and substance.
So it is very much an ongoing dance.
One with lots of intertwining, dips, lifts, and leaps — the dips no less glorious than the lifts and leaps from this perspective.
From the perspective of wholeness. And inclusivity. And deep appreciation.
When we take those labels off, it’s all grist for the Mill. Clay for the Potter. Raw materials for the Metamorphosis that turns coal into diamonds.
In quantum reality, each moment flashes on and off. Like individual frames of a movie. We can isolate one frame, but it doesn’t tell the whole story? If we tried to do that, would it be real? Would it be fair?
My roommate does prison ministry.
Rev. Aikya Param’s corresponded with and counseled hundreds of prisoners over the last twenty years. She’s connected with many beautiful souls who used their time behind bars to transform their lives.
They’ve surrendered to the metamorphic pressure cooker that prison can be, using that time to sprout new growth. A woman who served twenty years had certainly been accused of things we would label ‘wrong.’
Yet she used her time to read Aikya’s words of inspiration and encouragement, while getting her BA, doing research for a book on incarcerated women, and beginning graduate school, all behind bars.
After many prayers, she was released in time to start her fully-paid Ph.D. work at NYU. She went on to get married and become a mural artist/producer in Philadelphia.
Who’s to say if she had not been there, done that, if she would have gone through that same transformation to the woman she is today?
We tend to think of birth as good and death as bad.
Yet both are life transitions we all experience.
We could argue that birth is the more traumatic of the two, with the womb convulsing all around us, pushing and shoving us out of our happy amniotic comfort zone to a place where the cold air and bright lights hit us in a raw and painful way.
We have to breathe on our own in seconds or else. We have to learn to cry for nourishment and suck hard when it’s offered. How rude and crude is all that compared to life cradled in the womb.
Meanwhile, if we’re writhing in pain on a lumpy hospital bed, or hooked up to so many machines we can’t move or talk, who’s to say death doesn’t come as a sweet release?
When we imagine folks moving into the beautiful light we hear tell about from near-death experiencers, it sounds inviting. I’ve heard it likened to taking off a too-tight shoe or girdle.
Freedom. Absolute freedom.
When our humanity judges alone, without the lens of our divinity, our vision is incomplete. When our divinity judges alone without the lens of our humanity, our understanding may be simplistic.
But when both dance together, entwined like lovers, then, oh, then, we approach Rumi’s field. The grass is radiant!
Our souls pour themselves out with wisdom gleaned from living life as a spiral dance.
Thank you Diana C. and Joseph Lieungh for this provocative prompt!
Marilyn Flower writes political humor and satire to delight socially and spiritually conscious folks. She’s a regular columnist for the prison newsletter, Freedom Anywhere, where she writes about faith and prayer. Clowning and improvisation strengthen her resolve during these crazy times. Stay in touch!