Living Not Alone

Everything that lives,
Lives not alone,
nor for itself.
—William Blake

It is self-evident in a moment of stillness, in a quiet walk in the forest, in the beauty of a moonlit sky, that our lives are part of something immeasurable.

We know this. We know that we are both the teller of the tale and the expression of the story itself. We know that we are the meeting point of heaven and earth, the divine and the comic, the relative and the absolute. We can experience the divine in the depths of our humanness. We have the capacity to love.

We know this. But, we have forgotten it.

We have lost our way. We have lost our perspective. We have lost our understanding.

Like archaeologists of the soul, we begin to uncover the debris of our mind. Our need to exist in full relationship to our world is what drives us. The layer upon layer of ideas, conditioning and fear is what we dig through.

In this search, we have somehow forgotten that we have forgotten. The search has taken on a life of its own. The search has given us meaning that substitutes for what we have forgotten. But, searching for love will not replace love. Nothing will replace love. If we forget everything else, let us remember that.

As we move through our life, as we uncover each stratum of mind, as we make our way through each reaction and discover each new aspect of understanding, can we remember that the expression of love is life itself?

The great discovery of the archaeology of the soul is that the search is over before it begins because what we are looking for is what is looking. The wholeness of life is everywhere and is everything. We are already immersed in life and life in us.

In this we find that we do not need to discover love, that our being is one. But, now we can discover because we love. And, because we love, we know that we live not alone.

Then why, we must ask, do we live as if we were alone?