Man Is One World
Thoughts Before Dawn
Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.
—George Herbert
I wake this morning, before dawn, take a shower and descend our stairs. Outside, the birds are already singing. They call to me, and I ignore them; they are calling me to join them. But I have other things to attend to, thoughts that consume me, unresolved conflicts to work through.
I stare at our shelves of books. Where is it, the one that I am looking for? I ask what I want to know, what knowledge I am seeking, what subtle prompting woke me today. The thought stirs within my still-sleeping body.
It speaks: I want to know Everything.
There it is. The truth. I thirst, I yearn to be united with the multiplicity. I want the All, anything and everything that can be known. I stack a pile of books before me, one after another, ancient and modern.
I begin to tear through them.
I flip like a starving man at a buffet line. I do not know what I am doing; I only know that I am hungry and I lack the ability to know what will nourish. I grab this one, then that, read a line here and then there. None is right.
There is something else that calls. Not knowledge but Being. I can’t help but want to capitalize that word. It wants to be reckoned with. I used to wake early to meet God, but now I meet myself. Is this blasphemy?
Rumi said the more he sought divinity, the more he found himself. The more he drew himself within, the more he found the ultimate. It is like that for me, too.
What is real, what is false? What is this dance of duality the ancients intimated with their poetry and myth-making? What is the constant collapsing of patterns I cannot hold onto, the ascent and descent of every form, one thing becoming another?
I don’t know.
Who am I? What am I becoming? What is the future I dream of?
I can see another me, far off, reaching across the chasm that separates now from later. It pulls me to itself. How do I get there?
The light is breaking, I can see dawn stirring, and the birds continue their song. They know what I do not, what I keep forgetting, that knowing is not the way. My mind is a dagger cutting up the world into tiny shapes to be examined and understood. But I fail.
I am a crude remanufacturer of reality—not an artist, never an artist, I could never paint the sun, could never draw mystery. All I can do, all I could ever do, is sit on this couch, dreaming of the first sip of coffee, watching the world through a window, softly uttering the word wow.
I sit in my backyard, often with a book. But soon the birds arrive at the fountain, drinking and bathing and chirping. I close the book and share your observation. Wow.
What you describe is the yearning that exists inside every person ever since Adam and Eve yearned to return to the garden. Keep searching.