Every sensation

Every sensation is a movement of energy, but I don't really understand it that way.

My relationship to my sensation seems personal so much of the time. It belongs to me; it's mine. I take it for granted; my body, my life are so obvious they don't need or perhaps, in my mind, even deserve my consideration. I just use them as I wish.

 I don't stop to consider that every expression of energy is a sacred force. All manifestation emanates from the divine; while I ought to perpetually honor that, instead, I forget everything. I want food. Is there enough money? That woman looks good. And so on. I suppose that these crudely formulated approaches are, in themselves, some low form of honor, but they don't have much respect in them.

When I see something like this daisy, which I took a picture of on the Outer Banks about a week ago, I have a bit more respect. This is a remarkably ordinary flower— they grow all over the place— and yet something is going on there, there is an expression of perfection in this particular plant that strikes me. A vibrancy, a quality of energy — yes, energy, form, color, manifestation — that makes a deeper impression.

Even now, that impression is in me as I relive the experience, and I see how the impression is a kind of food that supports me. It's not bread, or meat, or air; it is some other kind of food, something I generally don't think of as food. Yet it is food; spiritual food. And despite the tendency of spiritual food to be presented to us in magnificent yet overblown venues such as the Sistine Chapel, it's these very small impressions that somehow sink the deepest into me and say the most to me about where I am, and what needs to be respected.

 I see that I'm not present enough to my life. That's the bottom line. And yet I can't change that myself; only an energy from a higher level can effect any real change, and that begins from within. Not from a place where I exercise my own will, but from a place where help arrives.

That's a mystery. It will probably remain forever unexplained; it is where I meet the cloud of unknowing.

Then these sensations, these movements of energy, touch me.

And only then do I know that I am not alone.