reality sucks/life blows

No it's not a rant... it doesn't mean what you think.

Reality... the reality of God, sucks the breath out of you. Sucks the life from you... the dense life of flesh and blood and guts and grime.

The whole theme of transcendence has been swirling about me for days. Transcendence/thinness/ the veil between the physical and the spirit... it's an interesting (and arresting) subject. That it would suddenly pop up in so many of my readings lately may have to do with the lectionary, but I doubt it. Even my so-called pagan friends are exploring the topic. "If you hear it twice, pay attention!" is an old expression. Okay God, I'm paying attention.

I have experienced thin places in the world. In Ireland, specifically. On the Aran Island of Inis Mor I walked a labyrinth, and that experience turned my world upside down. Talk about thin. In the short week I spent there I developed psychic power, connected with an old soul I knew but had never met before, came back to the states a broken, yet transformed woman. It was the beginning, or one of them, anyway. I was depressed for months and turned to my art for solace. Images from Ireland, photographs I had taken there, transformed themselves on my computer into multi-layered composites... glimpses of the thinness I had felt and seen.

As I've mentioned before, certain music thins the veil for me. There are many paths to the truth.

Here's some of what I've been reading:

... Spirit. It wasn't a strange place, but an additional dimension of the actual. (Jesus) saw it, and others could see it, too. It wasn't a cocoon uniquely reserved for him or a prize that only the named elect could attain. It was simply the more that always exists but isn't always experienced. —Tom Ehrich

...And so we go back and forth, catching tiny glimpses of heaven here and there amid the great swaths of life's daily-ness. For the most part, we're not built to behold heaven; we can't look God in the face for very long.
— Barbara Crafton

sometimes life blows…
and sometimes life blows me away

both
at the same time
—Pat Denino

Humankind cannot bear very much reality... — T.S. Elliot.

No one has seen God it says in the Bible, yet Moses supposedly saw God and it burned a glory into his face so bright and hideous he had to wear a veil. Bright and hideous? Oxymoron? Perhaps. Yet...