My third insight came when the great thrill about accepting the pain died down, and suddenly I started feeling that perhaps my life was not okay after all. How could I bless my life just as it is?
In a kind of spiritual exercises, I asked for help with this. And what I learned really echoed the other two. I was unable to bless my life because I was living too much from the periphery but not from the centre.
What was at the centre? At the centre there was the miracle. This seemed to be the miracle of birth, rebirth, transformation, magical awakenings. This miracle was the miracle of life itself. It had nothing to do with “my” life.
And here I came back to an understanding that has been hovering around for many years. It is about “my life” and “life.” So many times I would hear people say “I love my life.” and I somehow didn’t know what they were talking about, and so I thought, as usual, that I had got it wrong, and simply I didn’t love my life.
But I came to understand that although I didn’t love my life, I did love life. ” My” life has come to seem like a kind of capitalist notion, the life I own and which is mine. But “life”….that is a different matter. To love life is to participate in that which we all share, whether we are rich or poor, happy or unhappy, even animal, vegetable or mineral.
To love life is to honour the miracle at its centre. To hell with “my life”. That will take care of itself.
Post Script: I’m in Skyros now, and I saw the sun rise over the sea. For me, that red sun as it peeks over the horizon has always been the ultimate. I’ve always wondered why. But now, when I saw it, I thought of the third insight: so this sun rise is the miracle at the centre. Never mind that it is really just the earth turning. At that moment, in the relative reality that we live with on this planet, I have witnessed that daily miracle of birth, rebirth and transformation. No wonder I am in love.