resonance 201

Have you felt the way certain music enters your body--the sounds eveloping you from the outside while resonating throughout your inside until, if you're lucky, for a moment you are one with the song?

Or imagine you are walking in a lush forest in the mountains of some faraway place. You stop to catch your breath and take in the view--a particularly lovely grove of trees. You exhale just as the wind comes rustling through the high branches, and for the moment of that breath, the seemingly random imperfections of nature are revealed as a set of beautiful interlocking patterns connecting leaves to branch to limb to trunk, to all things across the forest floor, up through your feet, then flying out like spirits through the window in your chest, up to the sky.

I have these experiences most with nature, music, art, but occasionaly with objects, and even sometimes with my clumsy words. It is rare luck to find it in another person.

Since we live our lives in a world so sadly disconnected and distracted from that experience, I sometimes forget it is possible at all. Or maybe I shouldn't blame the world, maybe sometimes I close myself to it. In any case, I am profoundly grateful for those reminders, when they do happen, of the mystery and wonder that allows the universe to be contained in a blade of grass. Or as my experience with you, to feel your creative energy, gentle will, openness and laughter as well as some sad, dark parts of you that all seem to resonate in me so harmoniously and effortlessly, the echoes finding home within similar places inside of me.

So I want to thank you for this gift that maybe you didn't know you were giving. And I can only hope it is returning to you in some form that pleases you as much as this does me.