When I wake up in the morning is when I feel it…

…that feeling in which the lines, the boundaries, the demarcations that I use to define myself are the most porous, the most fluid, almost invisible.

It’s not a bad feeling.

On the contrary, it’s a feeling of oneness, of wholeness with “other” and with others. A feeling of belonging to something outside of myself when I/myself does not so much as diminish as it becomes part of a whole that I do not otherwise experience being a part of.

Those mornings are when I have my most creative thoughts, when my greatest insights to the problems in my life come, when my deepest awareness comes.

They are the mornings for which I hungered when I retired from the corporate world at the age of 55. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my work life at that time, but I promised myself whatever it was, it would not include fluorescent lighting, windows that didn’t open or being awakened by an alarm clock.

The best of those three promises has been the mornings that I have had sans alarm clock. Waking from slumber gradually allows my unconscious brain to come forward and bring with it the vast troves of wisdom and knowledge it has access to.

One of those mornings in particular, I awoke with a hauntingly beautiful piece written by Adam Lee in my mind. At the end of Lee’s essay are two exquisite paragraphs that had been used at a memorial service I attended. I have never forgotten those ever-so-comforting last two paragraphs in Lee’s essay, and when I awoke remembering them, had the distinct feeling that at that very moment there was someone who had lost someone they loved, and who was suffering, and who needed to hear those most incredible, peace-giving words.

I share the first of those two paragraphs here in the knowledge that somehow the person who needs to read them will indeed find them and be comforted.

“Compared to the great vastness of the cosmos, the ocean of deep time, my individual existence is a blip, a bubble in the foam on the surface of a flowing river. I am a momentary arrangement of atoms and molecules—an arrangement that lives and moves, to be sure, an arrangement that thinks, laughs, appreciates beauty, dreams, and loves—but a mere arrangement nonetheless, a transient state, an ephemeral gathering.

Soon the blip will go out, the bubble will pop, the arrangement will dissolve, molecular bonds released by entropy. My consciousness will cease. But the molecules that once were me will still exist. The atoms that made up my body—iron, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, all the heavy elements forged in the crucibles of dying stars—will remain.

Liberated from their temporary home, they will rejoin the rest of the planet, taking new shapes, finding new arrangements, becoming part of other life. I will become merged with everything.”

If you wish to read the rest of this beautiful portion of Lee’s essay, click here and scroll down to the last two paragraphs.

Relephant bonus:

Relephant Read:

Read this When You Don’t Feel Good Enough.

Author: Carmelene Siani

Editor: Emily Bartran

Photo: Pixoto