Reflections
I’ve found myself admiring the reflections in water I happen upon this summer: a bank of clouds drifting caught in the expanse of the irrigating ditch or the line of pines caught in the water I’m drifting through in mountain lakes. Recently, we had a deluge of water pour through our hills after a sudden storm. Water ran down the draws filling little reservoirs along the bedrock it flowed over. As I stepped over a small rocky pool, I was caught by how much of the sky I could see in such a little bit of water.
There is a Hindu myth in which Krishna gets in trouble for eating dirt. His mother, Rama, scolds him and he declares it is not dirt in his mouth and asks her to look for herself. When she peers into his little jaw she sees that it contains the entire universe: the heavens, the earth covered in mountains, islands, and ocean as it orbits through the sky; she saw the wind and lightning, the stars and each phase of the moon; the water and fire and space itself. She saw the mind, the senses, all of the elements and matter of which life is made from. She saw all of humanity’s nature and actions and hopes, then her own village, and, finally, herself. Overwhelmed, she felt fear, awe, and then a great love. She bowed down, amazed at what she had seen, a God whose nature cannot be imagined or grasped by the mind or heart and cannot be expressed in words, a universe inherent in one entity, whose depth is utterly impossible to measure.
Like Rama, I am awed, in fear of, and in love with a great mystery. My heart breaks open at the wonder it witnesses, the surprise I feel in sudden temporary moments of clarity. To see the entire sky held for a moment in a pool of water that appears only as the aftermath of a great storm and sudden flooding, that will itself soon dissipate in the heat and wind of an afternoon, arrests me. I stop in my tracks to take it all in, grateful for the wonder of shifting perspectives, the ability to see the world upside down now and then.
Like Rama, I am awed, in fear of, and in love with great mystery. Asking less questions and living in the trust that I may never grasp the entirety of how and why each path has led me from here to there is its own freedom. There are rare moments when I can come to peace looking into Krishna’s mouth, understanding my place as a grain of sand in a universe teeming with so many layers of existence.
