In the beginning there was:

No name.
No world.
No self.
No other.

Only the unknowable ground from which all things arise.

Then came the great unfolding.

Awareness meeting itself as experience.
The One appearing as the many.
The timeless entering time.
The formless taking form.

And so began the long journey of becoming.

I became a body.
I became a mind.
I became a story.
I became heart-sore.
I became a seeker.

I learned to name the world and to know it.
I learned to separate this from that.
I learned to say 'I' and 'you.'
I learned to seek what seemed lost.

And in seeking, I discovered wonders.

Love and grief.
Beauty and terror.
Meaning and confusion.
Birth and death.

The world revealed itself through relationship.

But the seeking remained unfulfilled.

I turned inward.

I looked for the self I believed myself to be.

I found memories.
I found sensations.
I found thoughts and feelings.
I found fears and desires.
I found histories and identities.

But the one who possessed them remained strangely elusive.

The more closely I looked,
the less I found.

Until at last there was only the looking itself.

Not a thing.
Not a self.
Just this luminous mystery of being aware.

And still the inquiry continued.

For what is awareness?
What is this world?
What is God?

I looked again.

Every answer dissolved into a deeper question.
Every certainty opened into a wider horizon.
Every understanding dissolved into uncertainty.
Every question returned me to wonder.

A pause.
A reflection.
A glimpse.

Perhaps the Infinite appears as creation so that relationship may arise.

Perhaps spirit and manifestation are the great conversation,

An interpenetration through which the universe comes to know itself.

And perhaps the end of the journey is not knowledge at all.

Perhaps it is the return to mystery.

A sacred not-knowing.

The recognition that
what I truly am,
what you truly are,
what the world truly is,
and what God truly is,
can never be captured.

Only lived.

Only loved.

Only wondered at.

Perpetually.

For what is unfolding is Love itself,
Time and Space opening the doors to endless possibilities.
I am always at home
And always journeying out to discover ever more.

No path.

An endless return.

Grateful for the questions.
Grateful for the unfolding.
Grateful for the mystery that forever exceeds my grasp

and yet gives itself completely in this moment.

Amen.

Image: “Monk by the Sea” Caspar David Friedrich – Wikimedia Commons