A Mystical Moment

An Excerpt from my Spiritual Will

Value:  Take time to smell the roses along the way.  A contemplative way of living makes for a fullness of life.  To notice hundreds of geese winging their way south over your head as you open the gate to your daughter’s home is a moment to pause and delight in.  To stand in the street and marvel at a rainbow over the valley is to touch the wonder of life.  To feed the birds and watch the squirrels hiding food away for the winter is to join in the dance of life.  To notice your hair blowing past your face as the weeping willow branches sway is to enter into the oneness of all things.  To renew yourself, take walks where you pay special attention to your senses:  What am I smelling, seeing, hearing, tasting, and feeling?  Even a few days of this at 15 minutes or more will open life up to you.

Illustration from My Life:  Twelve days into the thirty days of silence, light, sound and fragrances swallowed me up.  These sensory companions separated me from the noisy comings and goings of other retreatants.  I was making my Ignatian retreat to integrate my experience of a sudden recovery of health after a very long eighteen years of illness.  On this twelfth day, I felt alone, clothed in luminous air as I softly moved toward the lower-level doors.  Once in the garden, and thankfully no one else being present, I paused to breathe in the heavy scent of eucalyptus, the underlying fragrance of pines, and to listen to the unfamiliar bird calls some fifty feet in the air above my head.  Just up ahead stood an ancient willow and along the path tall fragrant grasses wet with the morning fog.  My skin felt cool and damp as I paused to drink in my experience.  “Tuning up the senses” is what my spiritual director called it…being fully present to what is.  How long I stood there pondering the gently moving fronds of the willow and the swaying of the tender grasses only God knows.  But at one point a slight breeze caught some strands of my hair, longer in those days, and brushed them against my face painting me into the scene and making me one with the nature around me,…not separate from the tree… not separate from the grasses… not separate from the breeze. Before this moment I was a human being; and after, I was something more.  And by grace, when I re-entered the retreat house, those who had been distractions to my silence, were transformed into something more too, all of them filled with the same light and wonder and love that had swallowed me.