"if you're lost
and you look,
you will find me,
time after time..."
If this post had no other purpose than sharing my sister-in-law, Lisa Redfern's gorgeous recording of Cyndi Lauper's timeless "Time After Time," it would be enough. I hope you will listen to it in a quiet space -- when you want to feel something deeper than time.
I first heard Lisa share -- to say "perform," would cheapen what she gave us that day -- this beautiful ballad during a loved friend's celebration of life. I can't speak for anyone else who heard it, but for me, it was transcendent.
All sense of time and space receded. All that existed was our friend and her love for each of us -- and ours for her. I felt like only my skin itself was holding me in shape. For all that I knew, and all that I loved, was dancing in the air, like dust motes in the sunshine, with our friend and her friends -- and humanity itself.
Humanity felt like a verb, rather than a noun -- a collection of bodies with independent minds and stories. The dance was one of complete unity - and a dissolution of personal sense. There was not one being who had completed a "life cycle" and had passed on, and the rest of us still bumping around in skin-contained bodies -- we were all released from things of time and space. We were spiritual. And I felt it.
Later on in the celebration, we danced as a collective -- and the singing prayer, that we prayed as we danced, left me feeling cleansed, and healed, and full of childlike hope for each of us and the human mechanism we would each return to, when we folded ourselves back into skin, and clothes, and cars, and planes -- for the trip "back home."
Ram Dass once wrote:
I first heard Lisa share -- to say "perform," would cheapen what she gave us that day -- this beautiful ballad during a loved friend's celebration of life. I can't speak for anyone else who heard it, but for me, it was transcendent.
All sense of time and space receded. All that existed was our friend and her love for each of us -- and ours for her. I felt like only my skin itself was holding me in shape. For all that I knew, and all that I loved, was dancing in the air, like dust motes in the sunshine, with our friend and her friends -- and humanity itself.
Humanity felt like a verb, rather than a noun -- a collection of bodies with independent minds and stories. The dance was one of complete unity - and a dissolution of personal sense. There was not one being who had completed a "life cycle" and had passed on, and the rest of us still bumping around in skin-contained bodies -- we were all released from things of time and space. We were spiritual. And I felt it.
Later on in the celebration, we danced as a collective -- and the singing prayer, that we prayed as we danced, left me feeling cleansed, and healed, and full of childlike hope for each of us and the human mechanism we would each return to, when we folded ourselves back into skin, and clothes, and cars, and planes -- for the trip "back home."
Ram Dass once wrote:
“We are all
just walking
each other
home."
I still feel it. Every day. The clock ticks, but it tells us nothing about the eternality of Life. The immortality of all beauty, and love, and grace.
We traverse space. We count steps. We measure the mass we take up. We drive miles and fly kilometers. We own acres, and build square footage. But do we? Is this all part of the distortion that says we are isolated, solitary ideas with stuff that we have accumulated -- and will one day leave behind?
Lisa's singing of "Time after Time," left me with a much different feeling. I glimpsed the substance of it all. All of those dust motes of consciousness that dance and swirl -- are simply gathering and coalescing in moments of purpose. We are not isolated solitary ideas with personal minds that control a limited number of those dust motes under a membrane of skin.
We are so much more -- and we are, "one with the earth and the sky" -- and each other. We are constantly shifting like water molecules that become visible as a cloud or rain -- but then invisible as steam and mist. One form no less - or more - substantive and real than another. We are not static, but ever-evolving. We are not born into a shape, defined by a mind that accumulates stories and stuff -- starting with a birth story and continuing with a false narrative of mistakes and accomplishments, successes, accidents, surprises, and failures. We are so much more, than what appears to be.
Through love, we are drawn into, and released from, limited and limiting forms -- existing only in shifting shapes of purpose. But we exist eternally as spiritual substance -- changeless, infinite in scope, as eternal as Love itself. We are as irrevocable as a molecule of water's capacity to be drawn into purpose as steam, mist, rain, river, sea, breath for a fish, sacred for a Savior's last lesson, humble in falling, exalted as a prism for revealing a bow of promise.
I have, as a friend would say, "gone off the rails." I could write about what this feels like -- at the depth of my heart and soul -- for hours and hours. Listening to Lisa singing again this morning brought it immediately into focus. But I will leave this here. If it's something you would love to ponder together -- give me a call. Or text. Or email. Or just sit quietly in a sunny corner, listen to it again -- we will hear it together. And we will dance, like dust motes in the gathering space.
Thank you Lisa.
offered with Love,
Kate
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