“We could never have guessed, we were already blessed, where we are….” James Taylor
This reminds me of a woman who found a folded sponge all dried and compressed, and tucked inside the hardened fold was a message she’d been seeking. She carried the hardened sponge to the sea and, up to her waist in the deep, she watched it unfold and come to life in the water. Magically, the secret of life became visible in the bubbles being released from the sponge, and to her amazement, a small fish, trapped in sleep in the hardened sponge, came alive and swam out to sea. From that day on, no matter where she went, she felt that little fish swimming in the deep, and this – the swimming of the little fish that had for so long been asleep – gave her a satisfaction that was somewhere between peace and joy.
Whatever our path, whatever the colour or garb of our days, whatever riddles we must solve to stay alive, the secret of life somehow always has to do with the awakening and freeing of what has been asleep. Like that sponge, our very heart begs to unfold in the waters of our experience, and like that little fish, the soul is a tiny thing that brings us peace and joy when we let it swim.
But everything remains hard and compressed and illegible until, like this woman, waist deep in the ocean, we take our sleeping hearts in our hands and plunge it tenderly into the life we are living.
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