The Temple

The heat in Miami this summer made me question everything:

My sanity and my life choices, for living here.
Every summer I’ve lived in Miami had this effect.
But now the weather is cooling again. 
In this city there are no visible signs that fall is here: 
No deciduous trees changing colors,
No apple orchards or pumpkins to pick. 
But the air has a quality of mercy to it.
There are pleasant walks outside at sunset. 
Last month I moved into a new place by the bay,
And I visit the water’s edge often. 
It is my temple, my place of worship.
I have met God there many times, swimming
In the shallows by the rocks, in plain view
For anyone with eyes to see.

Last night my teacher was a manatee —
Some call them sea cows — who surfaced 
Ten feet away from me to take a breath, 
Before lazily diving again. He moved in slow motion, 
Like a monk doing swimming meditation. 
All 1500 pounds of him 
Gliding as if weightless, unfazed
By the harsh gravity that grips in its tight fist 
All the mammals who choose to walk on land.
Going forward, but with no rush to get anywhere. 
With a slow push of his enormous tail
He slipped beneath the surface.
I waited five minutes to see him surface again.
All those years following my own breath 
On the meditation cushion
Brought me to this moment: transfixed, 
At one with the breath of an aquatic mammal.
Other people walked by, unaware of God
Ten feet away from them, gliding
Just beneath the water’s surface.

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by 
The color purple in a field somewhere 
And don't notice it,” wrote Alice Walker. 
So I try to appreciate the face of God
When it is shown to me 
In this temple at the water’s edge.

Last week it was a nurse shark
Who comes to the shallows hunting 
The little fish with black and yellow stripes. 
Or any fish she can sink her teeth into, 
Really. She doesn’t discriminate. But
I like to imagine the striped ones taste better to her
Because they are so colorful. 
The way she slithered in the water, 
Her entire body spiraling, undulating
Side to side: grace in motion.
She stayed close to me, putting on a show,
For several minutes, and then it happened:
She did what sharks are known for,
Which is bringing death. 
The fish she ate did not appreciate 
Her as I did: as the face of God. But
“God is everything or else He is nothing,” 
Wrote someone else. “God either is, or 
He isn't. What was our choice to be?”

And I think of this quote often: 
“By means of all created things, without exception, 
The divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us.”
That’s the theologian Teilhard de Chardin.
“We imagined it as distant and inaccessible,” he said,
“When in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.” 

The lion, the shark, the scorpion,
These are also numbered among God’s infinite faces,
No less so than the lamb, the puppy, or
The colorful striped fish who is eaten.
Your choice is starkly laid out before you:
God is everything or God is nothing. Which will it be?

A couple days earlier, a spotted eagle ray
Came to me in the temple at the water’s edge.
She too hunts the little fish hiding among the rocks. 
She too is a bringer of death, but she too reveals
Ineffable beauty for anyone with eyes to see. 
Bird-like, she glides through the water
By gently flapping her wings. Her fearsome tail,
Barbed with venom, trails behind her.
They are actually close cousins, the ray and the shark,
But then — truth be told — we are all cousins. 
Are we not? We all come from the same sea.
Our ancestors crawled from the water’s edge 
400 million years ago and made a choice
To remain on land. Yet. Still. 400 million years is nothing.
We are not so very different. 
We too are, each of us is, the face of God
Seeing itself reflected in the mirror of creation. 
I see myself reflected in the glassy, calm surface 
Of Biscayne Bay at seven thirty in the morning. 

As vast as the oceans appear that gave birth to us,

They are, after all, just a thin layer of water 

On the surface of a tiny orb. Earth is a single mote

In a dust cloud of solar systems in our little corner

Of one spiraling galaxy among 200 billion galaxies.

Let your mind expand outward into space,

And let it remind you how insignificant you are. 

Let the vastness and the mystery and the beauty

Humble you and remind you where you come from,

Where you are,

And where you are going. Ask yourself:

How could all of this be anything other than God?

Why would a whole universe have sprung into being

Out of nothingness? 

They say: “God is everything or God is nothing,”

But the truth is: Both. “Wisdom tells me I am nothing,” 

Said the sage Nisargadatta Maharaj. “Love tells me 

I am everything. Between the two, my life flows.”

Everything and nothing. Between the two, let your life flow.

Do not try to understand it with your mind. Feel it. 

A deeper part of yourself knows this, 

The same way you know your own face in the mirror. 

There will always be much we do not understand. 

I do not understand these people I see 

By the water’s edge, oblivious to the manatee 

And the shark and the ray.

Walking quickly past, talking on the phone, gossiping, 

Complaining about coworkers, parents, children, lovers. 

Asleep in their lives, believing their dreams are real.

Unaware that it is God looking back at them

In the mirror, through their own eyes. 

Somehow believing they are separate from the shark 

And the manatee and the eagle ray 

And the water itself and the land 

And the stars and the air and the rest of nature. 

Why do we forget what we are made of?

I do not understand these people.
And yet it would also be true to say that I love them. 
For that is what love is, as I understand it:
The felt recognition that we share the same being. 
You. Me. Lambs and lions, fishes and sharks,
Manatees and rays, even the earth itself,
And all the trillions of other planets 
And all the life as yet undiscovered and unsuspected:
We all share the same being. 
This is why I come here each day,
To this temple at the water’s edge:
To remind myself about truth, and love, and beauty, 

And death, and God, and spirit.