Cycle of Life

Nature is a source of great creative inspiration for me. I'm not sure how it works, but oftentimes, seeing something in nature creates a chain reaction and I quickly get an insight into some aspect of my life or life in general. Sometimes it's the reverse... I experience something and immediately see a connection with nature...

The other day, we were doing a guided meditation, essentially a review of the day... without judging anything that had happened. We were to be neutral observers of our day... and I had an insight of our lives... of life in general...

At some point, we've all learned about the water cycle... water evaporates from the ocean to form clouds, which move over land rising up and cooling as mountains are encountered, falling as rain, which then seeps through the soil into streams and rivers which flow back to the ocean.

It came to me that our lives are like that... we come from a vast Oneness (ocean) and are brought into this world as infants (drops of rain), living our lives for whatever length of time (streams and rivers) before finally joining the Oneness again. Some people live very long lives and are like very long, old rivers which meander as they slowly approach the ocean. Some people live very short lives, dashing down the mountains as creeks and rivulets, joining the ocean shortly after birth.

Our lives, like streams and rivers, are full of obstacles and set-backs. Sometimes we end up coasting for a long time (lakes), other times we are tumbling through a torrent of life (rapids and canyons). Sometimes it seems like our spirit has dried up entirely and we are just suffering through life (underground flow).

Like rivers, our lives can be fruitful and nourishing or wildly damaging. We can suck people into our vortexes or bear them up gently. Rivers and our lives shape the surface upon which we flow... Sometimes we go with the topography of life... sometimes we burst our channels and go elsewhere. Ultimately though, we all end up back in the Oneness... from which we do it again, in a different way, in a different lifetime.