Open to Other Worlds

For nearly three years, I have driving up the river valleys of the midstate from Harrisburg to Lewistown and home again - two or more times a week. The hour's journey often seems to pass by unnoticed in part because of the awesome beauty I encounter each time. It's amazing to see how the trips unfold, each one different. Glazed in ice and snow, draped in frozen fog, the rivers and the hilltops beckon. The scene changes every few seconds. It can make you mad with curiosity and transfix your imagination.

I want to tell you how the light changes almost every minute, and how a rock or a formation or a ledge that was in the dark one minute was revealed, brilliantly lit as if from within, the next.　 Sometimes, it looks as if a rock was on fire.　I can believe how Moses saw a burning bush not consumed. Sometimes, clouds that were just above me seconds later were beside and then below me.　Sometimes, the shifting light takes my breath away. I can understand how prophets saw visions of God's glory.

I often turn off the radio and suddenly start having a discussion with myself - no with God, really.　 Who am I in this other world?　 Who are you, Other World?　 What’s important here?　 What have I thought was important that’s not important at all?　 How have my perceptions of God, humanity, and the planet been limited by where I live, what I’ve been taught, and who I hang around with?

I want to tell you how important I believe it is to inhabit other worlds, if only for brief time.　Inhabit the world of someone who is not just like you.　 Ask yourself what’s important in that world.　 Ask yourself how you’ve been limiting yourself and others by not opening up to other realities.　 Inhabit another world by visiting a place you’ve never visited and really paying attention.　 Who are you there?　 What’s important or not important there?　 What didn’t you know about the world that this new place wants to teach you?　 Inhabit another world by taking a trip into your own soul.　 Who are you in your dreams?　 In your unexplainable behaviors and feelings?　 How are you unfamiliar with your deepest yearnings and desires?　 If you were, metaphorically, to step off the cliff of your ego into the depths of God, who would you be there?

What a gift it is to open ourselves to other worlds!　 When we do so we can inhabit the world we do live in fully, with presence, reverence, deference, expanded consciousness, and humility.