Rising above Material Matters

The frosts are intense this morning as another bout of wintry weather waits to blow in.

The trees and withered grasses are still like statues, rigid not just from the cold but from their dormancy as they await the return of spring warmth. The River Wye is icy still and full from melting snow while the soft blue mountains all around me, white-capped like old men, reflect upon their millions of years of life on earth. A buzzard swiftly followed by a red kite has swooped from a nearby copse to take scraps from an old oak stump in the garden and sits now in its feeding tree sharing its treat with its mate.

Everywhere I look there is life, both the life which is Spirit and invisible and the life which is its physical manifestation - its body, whether it be a wing or a branch or a rock. If what I hear on the news is true there is life and action further afield also: the repercussions of the Stockholm bombing; problems for Berlusconi in Italy; controversy over Irish bank bonus payments; legal challenges for Obama’s healthcare reforms….and also, today, by contrast, the death of Richard Holbrooke, the respected diplomat and peace negotiator, which sums up everything about existence: it will not last. 

Everything that is embodied or material, anything we can touch or see or hear or smell physically is impermanent, just as our thoughts and feelings are impermanent too because they are part of our personality. They do not matter in the greater scheme of things, neither do current events, for everything is transitory. Even our planet one day will die, as all planets do.Only one thing is permanent and that is the invisible life which is within everything and everyone, which connects us all and which is forever. Some could call it God. If we are able to rise above the mundanities of everyday human existence and sense just for a moment the vastness and awesome complexity of an infinite series of universes made up of space and energy and sometimes matter but every part of it touched by Spirit, and to know that we are a constant ever-evolving part of it, that this is what we are in truth and essence, we then can see our planetary life in perspective and perhaps with joy. 

By recognising, without fear or pessimism, that every manifested object in our world including ourselves will inevitably end at some point, our destructive attachments to people, money, success, appearance and so on cease immediately leaving the opportunity for a detached but compassionate understanding of what is important: being, growing, and expanding the Light always, despite time and beyond time, and accepting the perfection in this beautiful situation.