A Dolphin’s Quick Grace



Last week my full attention was arrested by the words and music of the extraordinary Christmas carol, “Silent Night”. Right where I was standing in the road, it flooded me with humility and awe. I instantly shot back in time to every nativity scene I had experienced in my youth. What is this alchemy that I am captured by in every cell in my body in this longing for the pure experience of the Divine, in this moment, in this season, in this song, this achingly tender song, creating and resonating in the very air around me?


I look up into the night sky.


Midnight, blue stars pulsing, punctuating the vast cold distances from star to earth, a shifting constellation, the whole-wide-world whispering and chanting, whispering and chanting…..


When Ande and I were dating, I used to say to her that I knew that I was in love with her because whenever I thought of her, I could “see” dolphins swimming in my solar plexus.


She probably thought that I meant endorphins, but she looked at me a little strangely and humored me. For my part, I was used to people looking at me a little strangely. So I carried on.


In time she has accepted the idea that the dolphins that swim in my solar plexus are but messengers to me (and to us) of the deeper waters that we all swim in, where our “wishes, fears and fantasies” plow an arc before us and lead us (though we protest that we are, after all, still in charge) to our better selves, to our magic, to our deeper reasoning—and to the labyrinth where all the mysteries prevail.


But at five o’clock this morning, in the grey light of a rainy winter day, I started recounting to Ande all the pain I had experienced in the world in recent months and ended my lament on the word “riven” which to me in that context meant “ impaled, driven straight through by sword or knife”.


The pain piercing me (that I had experienced through the lives and tribulations of so many people that I love) as well as in the world itself, with its traumas and agonies, so many lives interrupted, ended, so much loss—I was just ‘riven’.


As I said the word riven to my now waking wife, she asked wisely,“And what do you want to say back to the world?”:


I said something about the British Commandoes in World War II who were trained before battle to fully encounter the pain, fear, loss they felt with a simple but profound mechanism:“Breathe in all the negativity (fear, pain, loss), feel it fully and then release it all in your next breath (but not until it has been fully experienced on the in-breath).”


That reply, however, seemed hopelessly superficial, trendy, banal.


So we talked further about the two modalities of individual and collective action that are thought of as western world view on the one side (individualist), and Asian/Indigenous (collectivist) on the other. (Very broad brush strokes here). We discussed how these two ways of seeing the world bracket much of what prowls the streets of the world today looking for a place to claim as home.


There is a concept in my spiritual path which rests on the same principle, a “nesting” of the supreme “I Am” which celebrates the pure subjective declaration of the Self (both large and small) a claiming of one’s spot in the Universe uniquely.


“That” (in the ‘predicate” of the same sentence, I Am That) refers to the universal consciousness which pervades all things, the collective “I am” which infuses, and is infused by, the consciousness itself that creates, permeates and glues the whole vast fabric together.


Each of us is BOTH a pulse and a constituent element of“I am” AND “That”! We are all both breathe in and breathe out, inhale AND exhale: BOTH a citizen of our own interior world and citizens of the wide world around us. Actions must of be taken, but first we must establish a center within ourselves and then within a context in the world.


It has been said that the Universe is a “conscious entity” whose circumference is nowhere and whose epicenter is everywhere. Each “I Am” is a bud of “awareness” which collectively becomes “That”. The world is a summation of all the shards of light that we sing through the words of the lovely songs of Christmas, or the Sanskrit chants to Shiva, or the rituals of Chanukah, or the Native American incantatory drums, words and dance, or the Sufi mystical ecstasy, or the Shinto priest who answers the western scholar’s question about theology by saying, “I think we have no theology! I think we dance!”




Winter Solstice on Mt. Hope Bay


On this winter solstice evening
the bay is riven
By a thousand quick dolphins,
perfect swimmers
roiling its waters
to a splendor of light:
The Gifts of the Magi
To our breath are given
On this Night Divine
To the heralding joy
In abiding love
We sing

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