All glory to this fluctuation in the world that you call life. All the ins and outs are full of glory. The entrance to life on Earth is full of glory, and the exit too. It is a dance, this weaving in and out. It is a parade. You are very partial to this episode on Earth. You love it so much that sometimes you have thought that this interlude is all that there is. You see a line marked across the horizon such as a wooden ruler would make. Twelve inches, perhaps, and you have concluded that this is all of your life, this brief line that starts and ends on Earth.

When the line begins, there is rejoicing. When the line drops off, there is mourning. And you, ahead of time, sometimes mourn when you will shed the skin of the world and continue on without density, as if something dire happened. What has happened, beloveds? What do you think begins and ends when there is no beginning and no end? All that can happen is that the scenery changes. You move to another town very near to the one you inhabited during the illusory span of your so-called life on Earth!

Of course, all the while, you have your feet in two boats, one named Earth and one named Heaven. When you leave your body on Earth and you fly to Heaven, all that happens is that you leave your body and fly to Heaven. Why is this not a cause for celebration marking your rise and gain of full-time Heaven, Heaven solid, your enjoining Heaven without the illusion of following a story line and believing in it?

What a wonderful thing when you sprout your wings and fully and consciously fly to Me. In Truth, beloveds, there is no transition. It is all an as if, as if you were ever anywhere but with Me. When you leave Earth, truly you then pack up all your troubles and leave them behind. It is not even that you leave them behind. They vanish from view. They never really existed anyway. No matter how real they may have seemed to you, they were always evanescent. They were a puff of smoke, and that's all they were. No matter how momentous to you, they were nothing but the waves left in the wake of a ship. They were not even that. The waves were your thoughts convoluted in a certain pattern. Troubles were a cat's cradle that you made with string, and each construction disappeared with the appearance of the next, and none of them really existed. How and where would they exist when they were mere movement for a moment?

Where time is, reality is hidden. There is a guise, and it is called life on Earth. Life is a novel written in sand or on the waves of the Ocean. The water of the literal ocean doesn't consume itself in worry. The waves know they are waves. They are the ocean, and yet they are waves. It is no great puzzle to the waves that they are waves. It is the most natural thing in the world that they would furl and unfurl. They simply enjoy the movement. They do not know loss. Wherever a wave is on its curve, it takes it as a matter of course, and it enjoys itself. A wave rides a wave of itself. It is like a happy fish, swimming in the ocean it loves.

And so you are waves that swim in the Ocean of God. Now know that you are the Ocean you swim in.