Unhurried Steps
This morning I walk along an open field below an expansive clear, blue sky. The fire of the sun warms my winter-pale face. The overcast skies of late winter gave way, at least for today, to the coming spring. The temperature is warm enough that I don’t feel compelled to sally. I take my time. Unhurried steps slow down time.
I lift my head to the sun, and the sky becomes boundless, limitless space. Below such an expanse, I sense that if I had the capacity, I could fly infinitely outward. That is the thrust of the body – toward ever more power, to extend, to reach, to fly. That is the force of the mind – to discover, to think a thought never before thought, to seek, to find.
The healthy religious impulse is to reach out and touch the natural world, to explore, to sense, and to learn from the truth that the natural world communicates. The gray squirrels I encounter, scampering in the leaves on the forest bed, do not argue amongst themselves whether their scampering is right praise (orthodoxy) before a distant God, but respond simply (which means “one-fold”, PIE sim-plo) to a divine impulse felt naturally, an expansive impulse that sustains them as they climb, dig for hickory nuts and mark out territory.
The Soul spreads like fire, until it hits the rim. Heraclitus’ flame. Fox’s Light Within. Eckhart’s spark. Emerson’s “children of fire.” They are all names we use inadequately to describe the divine impulse within which desires to burst, to boil over, into ecstasy, where we are simple – one-fold, One.
Why so much focus on limitations and boundaries and legalism within religion? Do we fear the fire so much that we would risk missing out on the new life that emerges from the ashes of the old self?
I claim that faith which introduces God-filled, enchanted, wide-open space, – the orthodoxy of a clear morning sky over a wide-open field. I seek the paradox of a gray-hued woodlot covered in decay on the cusp of birthing a calico spring in just a few short weeks. I seek the fiery incarnation that is birthed in the soul in a morning saunter.