June 2006

I was on a plane headed to an ashram in the Bahamas recently when a storm came in from Africa and tossed our tiny craft around like a kite.

We made a white-knuckled landing in Florida and waited four hours on the tarmac until the airports were cleared to open again. People near me were anxiously talking about their claustrophobia. Their fear of death was infectious and I let the tingles of fear come up in myself. It seemed I also was not ready to drop into the ocean to my death, and that bothered me deeply. Something fundamental was missing in  my beliefs, that would relieve this foreboding.

We did arrive safely at our destination, but the storm did not cease as the wind tossed the ocean and palms for the next five days.

This was my tempest. I felt the winds would ease only after I addressed the source of my own inner turmoil.

There are some details to mention to set the scene. Prior to departure, one of the last e-mails I received was from Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God, who said he had produced a final book, on death. Unfortunately I did not have it in my hands.

Another detail. There was a Tibetan monk, Venerable Tenzin Yignyen, visiting the same ashram, who was constructing a sand mandala of Buddha of Compassion in the meditation temple. I was alone with him one day as he worked. He commented on how he liked my dress (oddly enough!) and I said I had bought it to wear when visiting the Dalai Lama during his visit to Toronto. It seemed a little Tibetan to me.

The monk said he lived with the Dalai Lama, and had also been drawing and instructing during the Toronto visit. I lamented I’d missed the sand paintings being put into Lake Ontario, so the monk said that this new mandala would be placed into the ocean the following day. I told him I saw this ocean as The Beloved. He smiled and said, “Yes.”

As I left the temple I saw a pile of books and picked one up. A passerby said, “You have to read that book, it matches your dress.” The book was, What God Wants by Neale Walsch and, as life would have it, the answers I sought were within its pages.

The message was very simple. The pain of the world has been conflict between and from people believing they know what God wants. But none of it is true. God has and is everything; God doesn't want anything. Our beliefs, which inform our behaviours and our communities, are based on thinking we know what God wants. Our core beliefs are faulty.

God doesn’t want anything.

Walsch goes on to say that God is life and everything in life. It’s not a question of believing in God (and all those religious ideas of who God is and what God wants), because God is Life. You can’t not believe in Life, that means not believing in yourself.

As I read the words I felt a weight begin to lift. I had not been comfortable with the word God because its meaning was defined by others. As a female I was comfortable with Great Mother to refer to the earth, as I noticed males felt equally ostracized by using Goddess. What began to fall away was the terminology. I did not have to use the words God or Goddess necessarily. I could use the word Life to describe cosmic consciousness.

Everything began to change. I am God as Kim, the trees are God being trees, you are God reading these words. All are sacred. All have keys to all the doors we care to open.

The storm ended outside as I came to feel this freedom within. On my last day the sun came out, the wind was gone, the beach was calm and empty as I stood in the surf to say goodbye and sing a song of gratitude. In keeping with Emoto’s suggestion I sang “Thank you water, I love you water, I respect you water,” and then sang those words to the sun, the wind, the earth. As I began to sing “I love you Life,” my chest heaved and it became almost impossible to sing.

Now, singing as Life to Life I had opened to an intimate relationship that had been somehow blocked, or shy. As my heart opened even more to all that is, to all that I am and have always been, I was choking on waves of joy as the symphony of Life embraced me. The ocean’s waves never touched my feet while I struggled to sing. There was a sense the ocean was waiting, like a loving parent, for me to finish. As I did, the foam came up and gently embraced me.

At that moment I felt loved on a huge scale. Life had been patiently waiting for me, grinning with pride as I opened the door.

What had been missing in my relationship with Life, was me!

Later, I realized I was standing in the surf where the monk had shared the sand mandala of Buddha of Compassion with The Beloved ocean.