In Celebration of the Body...

"If you live the sacred and despise the ordinary, 

you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion."

                                     --Zen Master Lin-Chi

It has been my effort, at times, to transcend the body, to transcend the Earth, dismiss it all as Maya, or illusion. I now see that this effort was a necessary practice in that it allowed me to enter the Mystery, to know it and to discern it in the extraordinary, only so that upon returning to the ordinary, to the 'real' body and Earth, I might know the Divine as pervading every aspect of what is.

The Divine does not only reside in the transcendent, the spiritual, but also in a stone. In a touch. In the mottled iris of a child. The Divine, I must concede, resides even in the pile of laundry at the foot of my bed.

The Divine pervades Om, but this does not mean that Om transcends or excludes what is not Divine.Rather, form, indeed phenomena, are a vital, if ephemeral, aspect of Om. Om contains and includes all things, physical and spiritual. It is the single syllable that spills into the universe as the acknowledgment of the oneness that our language, and even our practices, often fail to articulate.

In denying the body, we may for a moment gain a greater sense of what transcends it, but always, always one returns to the body, for it contains the whole of us. It is our vessel and it is our vehicle. It, too, is pervaded by the Divine. Though we must shed it when this lifetime comes to a close, though we believe in our essence as continuing on, after it ceases to be, the body, the Earth upon which it moves...these are to be embraced and ultimately celebrated..