It's the morning after the presidential election here in the United States. Like so many others, I got very little sleep last night.
When the flurry of texts and calls subsides, I turn everything off and settle on my meditation cushion. I sit at my kitchen slider facing the rising sun.
I'm listening to the Dalai Lama chanting OM. Following the rhythm of my breath, rolling in and out like ocean waves, I am gradually unmoored from election tension and sailing into silence.
When I sit like this, eyes closed to the sun, my inner vision is a field of undulating gold light. I'm reminded of a prayer I read recently in The Book of Runes by Ralph H. Blum. I interrupt my meditation to retrieve this little volume.
I turn to the page with the rune I picked on Halloween. Sowelu looks like a jagged S or a bolt of lightening. It's the Rune of Wholeness, Life Force, and the Sun's Energy.
Blum says this prayer, called the Gayatri, embodies the spirit of the Rune of Wholeness:
You who are the source of all power,
Whose rays illuminate the world,
Illuminate also my heart
So that it too can do Your work. [1]
I recite these sentences in silence, inviting the Divine into my heart.
After a few rounds, they repeat themselves of their own accord as my inner space opens and brightens.
Behind the resonant voice of the Dalai Lama, there's the sound of something spiraling through the air, end over end, like a delivery from the ethers hurtling toward me.
I don't know exactly what happens in moments like these, but it feels as if the rays of the November morning sun are streaming into my chest.
Suddenly, my energy field expands exponentially. It's radiating like a great halo from the nucleus of my heart.
As if the Source of all power is activating my heart, illuminating my inner world.
After a while, my inner vision fades to purple and I take it that this transmission is over.
I draw a an oracle card, The Lady of Lightening.
The Lady of Lightening brings powerful forces of change into your life. She tells you to expect a sudden shift in your circumstances. Perhaps a situation you weren't anticipating arises and offers you the opportunity of a lifetime, or a series of Aha! moments culminates in a pivotal flash of insight causing everything to change just like that. Maybe someone enters your life and pushes you to new heights. You may have a brilliant idea that hits you like lightening.
Be prepared; change is imminent, and a total paradigm shift may be upon you. [2]
This flash of insight penetrates the cloud of uncertainty that's been hovering for weeks as I navigate the pandemic, the election, and life generally turned upside down.
Later in the day my daughter sends a video from the OBGYN's office. I hear, for the first time, the beating heart of our first grandchild. It's pure joy to hear that steady rhythmic whooshing behind Meredith's happy voice.
It reminds me of something though.... That sound I tried to describe earlier -- like something spiraling through the air, end over end, behind the Dalai Lama's chanting.
It's the sound of a beating heart!
I don't know how to tie the synchronicity together like so many iridescent pearls on a string.
But there are these moments when the flow of time opens, like a river to the sea, into eternity.
Special Delivery
Illuminated by the Source of all power,
My heart
Finds its way
Through the eye of the needle.
Slipping through that slender opening,
Into an infinite field of grace
Reverberating with the heartbeat of the cosmos.
As a baby's heart beats
Underneath the heart of her mother
My heart beats
Within the heart of the Great Mother
And the love of each for the other
Through the great chain of being
Sparks creation.
1. Philip H. Blum, The Book of Runes A Handbook for the Use of an Ancient Oracle: The Viking Runes (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 140. This prayer is known as the Gayatri.
2. Colette Barron-Reid, Wisdom of the Hidden Realms Guidebook (Hay House, 2009), 97
