For much of my life I couldn’t hear the words ‘God’, ‘prayers’ or even ‘Spirit’ without cringing, and likely would have already stopped reading.   God, Spirit, prayer, soul… they had all absorbed the overtone of ‘religion’ which for me had come to be objectionable to say the least.

From a young age, I also couldn’t fathom the messages around me pertaining to God and religion.  Specifically, the idea that those I’d been born into were ‘right’ and all the others damned.  The National Geographic magazine was more of a ‘bible’ to me than the bible, and I trusted my interpretation of the photos it contained before I could read the words.  

The pictures told me that the people whose images they captured couldn’t possibly be wrong.  Their Gods went by different names, but that didn’t mean their Gods were any different, fundamentally from the one I’d been told about. Nor was the colour of their skin, the food they ate, the music they made, the love they created.. any different from ours.

The declaration that we were ‘right’ and they were ‘wrong’ (among other things) put me off.  Waaaaaay off.  

Paradoxically and perhaps secretly even to myself, I was existentially preoccupied.  So while I didn’t subscribe to religion, I wasn’t in complete denial of something greater… I was looking (everywhere) for something with credence.

It was in Blackness that I found it.  

photo courtesy Olena Bohovyk

When the mind is completely still.  When the space in between thoughts is expansive and sumptuous. 

In nothingness, drifting in the vast blackness of the universe.    With nothing visible to be detected but black.  Nothing beyond me, nothing behind me, above me or below me.  Nothing in the mind but awareness of unlimited, unbounded black, horizonless.  

Seeing infinity, in the complete absence of anything.

Suddenly, fear.  Dangling out in the middle of the cosmos, completely untethered, I realized we are doing just that.  (Sure, there’s gravity on this giant spinning spitball of dust we’re all on, but out there in Nothing (which is where Earth is, if you think about it),  there is no mass upon which gravity can act.  There is only more nothing.)

Those moments of fear were a free-fall (ironically), plunging through space but going nowhere.  

Then just as suddenly, I was aware I was held. An embodied paradox: speeding through blackness, suspended on nothing but perhaps the covalent bonds of nitrogen, hydrogen, helium.. whatever the gases are out there.

Then, Knowing.  As keenly as I could sense Something was holding me, suspended and safe, I also knew Something is holding ALL of this together.  Otherwise none of this, none of us would be here.  How else can this spitball and everything around it, after all that it’s been through, keep carrying on?

And.  That ‘Something’ doing the holding together?  

I’m guessing it’s the same Something that did the creating.  I mean, how else would it know how to hold it all together in such a way that it sustains the complete, utter majesty of and around our dust spitball… from the astronomical to the minutiae.  From the immensity of the universe (in which we ARE the minutiae) to the precise geometry of a dahlia or sunflower or the miraculous DNA-soup-rebirth of a caterpillar to a butterfly.  

As simple as all of this sounds when distilled into inconsequential words, it’s immense.  I invite you to allow yourself to ponder it.  What the heck is going on here, unless there’s Something far more intelligent than us?

When I do so, it simply no longer seems possible that there’s no Master, no Higher Power.  Creation.  Perhaps that’s the best word, as it is exactly that.  What is there, without Creation?  What if that was what they meant by ‘God’ all along?   The majestic force that is Creation itself.

🕊🤍💫