Through Which Roars the River

It was a few days ago at breakfast that the white hole opened up in the center of my mind to pour forth a new light of wonder into my dormant heart. Across from me sat Love; I walked over that bridge Einstein had created for me and into a new creation. The river gushed forth to sweep me away. I was near speechless, on the verge of tears of joy. Love in all its glory seized me by the heart and refused to let go.

That river of the mind found its temporal twin today, under a sky of pure cerulean punctuated by the commas of swallows swooping through the air. It was pressure in my mind and heart that pushed me out of my new home with cameras in hand. The pressure, the call to find some water, or train tracks or something like them. I found my way down to the banks of the Missouri river where it flows past downtown Kansas City.

It was there that the great blue and the breeze and the slow dance of the river made it clear to me that change is inevitable and often necessary, ever the more so in the case of finding peace within ourselves and love without. It is up to us to guide that change where possible, and go with it when it is ever so larger than our hearts.

The Missouri showed me this. Mighty bridges cross it. Its banks have been shaped by the hands of man. There are gates and valves, sluices and levees placed in an effort to manage cosmic uncertainty as manifested by water. On a peaceful day, under a bright blue sky, in the company of the occasional branch floating lazily along one might be tempted to believe that this placid river could not possibly ever be out of control.

But look closer. Look at the marks on the riverbanks. The driftwood here, the odd bit of flotsam there. See the rusty barrel five feet above the water line, the faint red paint set off against sun-dried silt baked to the color of pewter in the Midwestern sun. It is then that the old high water marks make themselves known. The depth gauges painted on the piers of the bridges suddenly come into focus. They look worn. They look used. Obviously, something swift and fierce has passed this way.

That swift and fierce thing swept over me again today, out there in the sun. I stood still, camera poised to capture an elaborate combination of light and shadow that had caught my eye. The instant the shutter clicked I flashed back to that morning at the breakfast table, across from Love, and the switch flicked in my heart. The white hole opened up to pour forth its energy of creation and it spilled down into my heart there on the banks of the Missouri, flowing down the levee and into the water, the circuit, it closed and the energy of the earth, the sun, the river, the Universe it poured back into a thousand fold, I knew it, I knew it there and then, I felt its majesty, I felt love all around me with my feet on the ground and my head in the sky and my heart in the hands of another, knowing beyond a shadow of all my doubts that we must tear down the dams we build in the rivers of our heart, risking the flood for the fullness of being…

…We must, dear ones. We must undam the rivers of heart-space-time to let them burst forth and carry us to where we can find that which gives us life, that which makes us human. Embrace the singularity. Cross your own event horizons. Come out the other side and into Love.