Breaking Through the Clouds: Teachings from the Mountain

As we fly by Mt. Rainier on our way to Phoenix for our yearly Mariners Spring training game and some sun in the desert, The Mountain shows up: Mt. Rainier, whom we rarely see, covered by clouds as she usually is.

She shows up bold, grounded, and, above all, Present.

Just like I want to be during these changing, chaotic, challenging times.

Just like I want all of us to be:

I invite us to show up fully and wholeheartedly with our lives, our love, and our bright torches. The world needs our light.

Present to whatever circumstances are given to us, even, possibly, seeing those circumstances, as the way to the transformation of the planet, the healing of the planet, the “evolutionary leap,” as Lynne Twist calls it, that is at hand.

I recently participated in a Webinar with Lynne Twist, author of Soul of Money, and her new book, Living a Committed Life, both books I heartily recommend. In this seminar, she shared with us that in 1976, Buckminster Fuller, known as “Bucky,” the inventor of the geodesic dome, predicted this time.

Fifty years ago, Bucky said that civilization was getting ready for a new paradigm — from a paradigm he called “a your or me world” — one based on scarcity, competition, and threat, to a “you and my world” – one based on partnership, inclusion, enoughness. He said it would take about fifty years to accomplish this shift and that before we did, the world would have to move into chaos before it could emerge from its darkness.

Now, with deep love, I invite you and me to show up: to be present, to befriend ourselves, to love one another, to express that love in many ways, and even to invent new ways, ways that may be unfamiliar to us and to who we have been being. To find each other, to create our community.

Only when our heads are out of the clouds of our automatic thinking and our automatic reactions, like anger, fear, resentment, and rage, can we be fully present.

Mount Rainier was a good Teacher for me, that day. A poem came knocking on my door, asking to be written down and shared with you.

The desert plants were beautiful.

The Arizona night sky was glorious.

The sweet, scented desert air was breathtaking.

It was fun to be at the baseball field with my husband. I ate a hot dog, gobbled down some peanuts, and shared a beer with Don.

What was most amazing, though, most amazing of all, was the bold, bodacious granite peak and the blanket of snow as we passed Mt. Rainier. Peeking out from the clouds, celebrating life, she asked us a life-giving question at the end of this poem.

May the poem be heart-awakening for you, as it was for me.

Breaking through the Clouds

by Amba Gale

Emerging, arising, 
from the soft down blanket
above the bed
of clouds,
I see your face.

Blinking in the sunlight,
powdered white,
you celebrate the blue sky.
The granite creases
of your old face
betray you,
show us the Elder that you are.

What can we learn from you?
You, who are
The Teacher
peeking out
from your hiding place
of white puffs
only 
every now and then.

I have lived here a long time, 
thirty-four years.

I have seen you rarely.

A gift it is to see you, witness you, be with you.

What do you have to say?

That you weep for the world?
That you stand for a healed planet?
That you hold both griefs and joys,
deep and momentous as they are,
in the taverns and the caverns of your arms?
That you promise to hold in Presence 
the past, the present, and the future?

That you ask us to fulfill the purpose
for which we were born?

I warmly invite you to stop, take a few moments, be with yourself and your heart, and ask your inner voice, your guides, or your muse, “What is the purpose for which I was born?”

Listen deeply. Listen with your heart. Listen well.

Then,

Enter your day with the intention to take at least one action that expresses that purpose manifested in the world.

Notice all the ways your life is given over to that purpose.

Celebrate and befriend yourself, living that purpose.

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