Excerpt from Psalm 65:8-13

"Those who live at earth's farthest bounds are awed by your signs; you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy. You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it...The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy, the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy."

Reflection by Felix Carrion

The psalmist as poet reveals the delights of earth in dream-like images, hearing even the earth's incantations. All of earth is alive and it "shouts and sings together for joy".

If we can speak of the psalmist as poet, we can speak of earth as Eden. In this vein, Eden is not a lost and guarded location somewhere on earth, to which we humans have no access. Instead, Eden is lost to our consciousness, the gateway of seeing and experiencing life "together" as an interconnected organism.

The book, Living Deeply: The Art & Science of Transformation in Everyday Life is a work of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which interfaces Western science with Eastern spiritual explorations of the inner life. In the foreword we read these lines, "But this [earth] is yours — your home. It is also the home of six billion other human beings and many trillions of other life forms. As you look, you feel a wonderful sense of oneness and togetherness with all of those beings living on this thin, delicate film on the surface of molten rock under a thin layer of air—like the fuzz on a peach."

The psalmist's poetic vision sees God still watering the earth, "the meadows clothed with flocks and the valleys decked with grain."  The psalmist's consciousness and vision flowered in those fields.

This is also the case for poet Lisel Mueller, who in her poem, "In Passing," writes, "How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom".

So it is with our individual and collective consciousness: it's waiting to shrug off its special mystery in order to break into blossom. Once it does, all of life will be a gift and an offering.

Prayer

O God, open my mind's eye so that I might see what you see and wake up once again in Eden. Amen.

About the Author Felix Carrion is Coordinator of The Stillspeaking Ministry, United Church of Christ.

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