Through paying attention we learn that
               even when we don't especially know or
                 like someone, we are nonetheless in 
                       relationship with them. 
            We come to realize that this relatedness is in
              itself like a vibrant, changing, living entity. 
               We discover the gift of caring, or tending
                 to this force of life that exists between
             us, and we are immeasurably enriched by that.
                     
                                    ~ Sharon Salzberg

Decide What Really Matters
By Paula D'Arcy
From "Waking Up to this Day: Seeing the Beauty Right Before Us"
www.Orbisbooks.com
 
I was traveling with a group of women in Alaska. We were in a small boat, grey waves parting at the bow, when I saw the first plume of spray. It took several seconds for me to understand what that meant, and by then one of the women was already shouting to the others, "Whales!" The first sleek, lumbering humpback lifted slowly from the frigid waters like a single streak of grace. Back arched, his rubbery tonnage rose into the air, showers of spray spitting back onto the sea. I couldn't breathe. Then, just as gracefully, he lowered himself back into the brine, his tail fanned with the flourish of royalty. We never moved. It was a flower opening, a split in the ordinariness of things, that single tail lifting and offering itself to the morning. Then slowly, with elegance, the great tail slipped from sight the second whale was already rising. I kept hearing my voice. Oh my God, My God.  We were all screaming, the six of us, the great gift of the whales too enormous to take in silently. We had to make sound.

Our boat slowed until we were thirty feet away. We rocked gently in the water, watching. There were three of them. We heard the great slush of spray, followed by the enormity of their leaping. One after the other, rhythmically, they bounded from the deep. My mind was not possessed by a single thought. Nothing. Everything was the rise and fall of the whales.

We'd called to them as we set out that morning, Please, show yourselves, we'd each silently intoned. Come. Life calling life, with nothing else intervening. And they came.

It felt as if a mighty hand had put the whales in a bow and shot them into the thickness of our collective dream state, willing to see us. The mark of the arrow was true. It wasn't just the whales and their beautifulness...their leaping. In fact, it wasn't nearly that. It was the power to know us. It was God putting God into a bow in the form of a whale, responding to our silent plea, Come.

The moment struck universal marrow, speaking a language I dimly understood. The whales were voices arising from a fertile soil where the deepest knowledge lies, waiting. They shouted to us, Don't go back to sleep. This fullness is meant for you.

In her book "Changing Light" Nora Gallagher sums it up, writing:

It's as if each of us has another, deeper life than the one being lived. It lies underneath our ordinary days, our errands, the doing of dishes, the writing of letters, the making of money, like something moving, lobsterlike, under water. This only partially understood life (refused, often; banished, easily ignored) might be what we call the soul. The desire to know about it causes us to pray. But all the while, it's moving toward something, as surely as we are advancing in our lives, through careers, marriage, children. Every now and then this hidden life surfaces...like a glimpse of things in that peculiar, vivid light after a rain.