How vast seems the length between life as you would wish to see it and the life that you do see. And this vastness is the distance you travel in life every day, as if you were going to work, commuting back and forth from the details of life to the expansion of life. You travel daily, back and forth, pacing the universe as it were. You hop from the humdrum to the ecstatic, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the capturable to the incapturable. You swing the finite and Infinite like a purse you swing to and fro as you walk.

Sometimes you feel nailed to Earth. Sometimes you feel smothered with details and broken handles. And yet, even so, the sun shines through, planets twirl, and you glimpse Heaven ‘tween the clouds. At such moments, you know, if only for a millisecond, that it is all worth it. For that one glimpse, it is worth it. You wouldn’t trade that glimpse for anything, no, not for all the gold in China.

It’s hard to know what to make of this dichotomy between ordinary life and the Vastness. Sometimes you wonder that perhaps you are living on the two sides of the Moon, for you transfer from light to dark and back and forth without a pause between. Or perhaps you wonder that perhaps you are the moon itself, cut in half, even slivered, and then, from time to time, put back together again. Or perhaps you feel you are the young moon waxing to the full moon where you shall be all light, and yet, even as you are full, already forlornly slipping into another cycle.

The mind cannot cope with this divergence. It is beyond the mind how you can be so warm one moment and so cold the next, how you can be filled with inexpressible bliss of God one moment, and the next, be inundated with broken pipes or grease spots on your clothing. You feel constantly interrupted from peace. Even in solitude you are interrupted. Your thoughts intrude. You interrupt yourself.

You would reach the mountain top and stay forever. Why must you be distracted, you ask over and over again. You are at the summit, and why can’t you stay here forever, once and for all? Yet, doggedly, you walk one mountain path, and then you find yourself on another. You are ascending, and then you find yourself falling into the valley. But the valley also has flowers you pick and put in your lapel. The valley, despite its intricacies, has its own joy. And so you pick flowers, and you pick yourself up and start the climb once more.

You memorize the climb. You reach the summit sooner than before. You stay longer. And when you trip down the mountain, you carry greater recollection of the sweetness. You are one who picked an edelweiss. It is still in your hand. It is clasped in your heart forever. For a moment, you have stood on Mount Olympus.

The day will come when there will be no valley. There will only be mountain top. You will have arisen above the clouds, no longer to return to the valley, no longer a valley to return to. The morning will come that you wake to yourself, and you are not even on a mountain top. You are above the mountains. You will have stepped out of space and time. You will have entered where there is no above nor below. You will have met yourself in a realm you have only glimpsed before in a flash of light, and now, you discover, you are the light glimpsed and you are irreversible.

The dark side of the moon no longer exists. There is no side at all. All is Oneness where there are no sides, no corners, no obstructions, no lapses. You are the white of the moon in the skies of Heaven. It doesn’t matter where your feet touch because what care you when you are emblazoned in a palace called Heaven? What do you care how long it took for you to get here when you get to stay? What do you care at all when you have this bright sun shining on your face?