Yesterday, on the crispest, clearest autumn day that we’ve had so far this year, I sat for a few minutes in the garden. The midday sunlight shone through the maple canopy overhead, illuminating the leaves bright red against the backdrop of the bluest sky imaginable.
Later, inside, we sat together in refuge. We were a random assembly of people of various ages, ethnicities, and gender identities (yes there are more than two here). We sat as individuals on our mats, or on our chairs, as the last golden shafts of sunlight graced the floors and the walls of the room.
We sat together as a Sangha: a spiritual family, united as one by our common compassion and our desire to give and receive loving kindness to and from each other, and the world round us. Though we were thankful for the comfort of mats and chairs and the warmth of the room, the building was not our refuge. The Sangha itself was our refuge.
A question was raised: “How do you find the sacred?” To be honest, I didn’t have a great answer.
With hindsight, I should have responded that we don’t find the sacred. The sacred finds us. We just have to be open to receiving the sacred that surrounds us every day.
I didn’t seek out that seat on the bench in the garden knowing that the angle and intensity of the sunlight at 10:50 AM would be just right, and that the blue sky would be so perfectly cloudless. I was open to sitting and shivering for a few moments in the garden (as I’d left both my coat and my phone in the car). I sat with no expectations and no purpose in mind. Then, the sacred found me.
This morning I thought about how beautiful those leaves and the sky were yesterday. I considered returning to the garden, with my phone, to try and recreate and photograph a similar sacred moment. But I knew that it would not be possible. Something would be different.
As it turned out, it rained today. As I walked home from class, I found the sidewalk littered with soggy red leaves. If I did return to the garden, I would likely just find wind-blown, barren twigs scratching at the rain-streaked sky.
But, no matter. There will be new wonders and sacred moments to come. Perhaps even in the most unexpected places.
The rain stopped, and a half block closer to home, in a different cluster of leaves, I found droplets of rain glistening like jewels in the flat, grey light. The droplets were so full that they appeared poised, on the verge of rolling off their cushion of leaves, soon to be lost forever to Somerville’s endless concrete desert. To my eye, the droplet’s dazzling magnification of the finest details of the leaves is beautiful and sacred.
The sacred found me again! I have proof of that, and more! The faintest reflection of myself (hooded, with iphone at the ready) offers reassurance that I am on a path that will bring the sacred to me time and again, and that I am prepared to receive it.
