Find the Divine. *not for the conventionally religious

I am in another yoga class.  I am breathing.  I am BREATHING IN.  And Out.   After 20 years on and off, in and out, the breathing hasn’t gotten routinely easier, and neither have the stretches that contort me in occasionally painful ways.   But, sometimes, something will resonate.   This is one of those times, but it didn’t happen sequentially.   Rather randomly, in fact, as many events in my life that are unexpected.

There is a phrase that yoga teachers seem to use.  I don’t know the origin or the exact wording, but basically it means that we all have a divine spark, the divine is within all of us.  For the longest time this was not meaningful to me---it was a lovely thing to hear, of course, but I had my doubts.   I may as well insert a note here about my religious history.  There was the Methodist preschool, and youth group when I was under ten.  We had a close family friend who was an Episcopalian priest who we went to for advice.   And then when my dad started to really feel that  “life is indeed short”  (probably in his 40’s, because that is what I am feeling) we were brought over to the Mormons who promised we could live eternally if we just signed up.   During my college years I found myself at the Unitarian Fellowship and, in fact, one of the best sermons I ever heard was on “Gardening” and I have never forgotten it. My marriage by a Rabbi to my Jewish husband inspired me to learn about the Old Testament and, in fact, my homemade challah rivals those who have inherited the tradition from the beginning of time.

And now?  I am comfortably adrift.  I love reading the texts from many religions, especially the Dalai Lama, of late, as he seems to really get the breathing,  (and the part about living in the moment.)  I could really use his advice about that because living in the moment is so hard when you are very worried about the future.

So there I am recently at a Bat Mitzvah, with my usual wandering mind about worry; I am noticing the adrenalized thirteen year olds, the dressed up adults (especially that woman who really rocked her leather dress and gray hair, hope I look that good in a few years…); Just the typical northeast scene on a Saturday morning at the ceremony celebrating the Jewish coming of age.   I practice being in the moment and up walks the Cantor and then she sings.  And it is like nothing I have ever heard.  The beauty is indescribable.  It reaches the absolute core of my being.  And suddenly, out of nowhere, I suddenly understand those yoga teachers.   I am witnessing some kind of divine spark.  In one instance, in this Jewish house, I ironically start to understand the eastern division of religion.  

And then, something happens a couple days later.  And this time, I am not in a place of worship where it is arguably easier to notice the divine.  Instead I am out at my chicken coop with some kind of new crazy problem.  There is blood on the walls and I cannot figure out how it got there.  I am in no position to get another chicken to the vet because my car has to go in for service.   The truer part of the story is that there is no way I can start examining my chickens because I have actually read those horror stories of what can go wrong when a hen delivers an extra large egg and it is nothing I want to see.   So I rack my brain and try to figure out what it is I am going to do as a suburban mom- thrown into accidental farming- when I realize there is one person I know that can help.  There is one person who can rescue me from passing out and falling apart.   And miraculously, he has not left for work yet.  More miraculously, he agrees to come over and investigate my chicken bottoms.   I leave to get to my car appointment and when I get home, he is in my backyard applying Neosporin to the insides of one of my chickens.  But what I actually see---not the upside down chicken at all—what I really see is a very big divine spark.

And finally, as if I needed more evidence that these yoga teachers might be on to something, I recently attended a class on a day that I had been feeling particularly anxious about a number of things.   As we are lying there she quotes a Haitian saying ---“beyond mountains are mountains.”   Is she talking to me?   And then she says,“when something is heavy, you have to let it go.”    She MUST be talking to me.   It is that divine spark, again.    I am suddenly finding it everywhere I go.