Pieces of the Puzzle

Sometimes during meditation I am quiet, peaceful, not much going on except breathing. Those are the rare times. Usually my mind picks up a piece of the puzzle of who God is, who we are, why we are, where we are in the great stream of creation.

I examine the shape, tumble it around in my brain, trying to fit it into something I've read, something I think I already understand. I look for patterns, recurring tendencies. One of those tendencies is irony. (It's probably my favorite, since I keep coming back to it again and again.) Another is movement. Our universe seems to be all about motion. Earth moves in orbit around our Sun, photons and protons move in a subatomic dance we can't see. We refer to our lives as journeys; metaphors permeate our language.

If I tried to paint a picture of this concept, the canvas would not be flat and the paint would be like quicksilver... rolling liquid moving over and through the surface.

If I wrote a symphony there would be fast movements and slow, the dynamics would change, dissonance balanced with harmony. There would be a recurring melody that you could sometimes hear clearly, and sometimes not at all. But it would be there. Maybe in the pedals... so deep and slow you'd miss the cadence... playing on and on without us ever recognizing it.

And the movement seems to follow a pattern. God seems to like circles and ellipses, spirals especially. Our own lives often come full circle. I find myself facing the same problem I faced years ago. But I've moved to somewhere else on the spiral path. It's the same problem but I am not the same. That recurring melody sounds different played through another instrument. We cannot stop. If we stop moving, we die.