My morning contemplation of the landscape rolling out from under the house has become a much-loved daily practice. I sit at the head of the kitchen table where my eyes are lured towards the expansiveness of windows open on to the fields. I have my pen and journal, a candle gently glowing on the table, a copious mug of steaming tea with milk, no sugar. I am ready to capture my vagrant thoughts and whatever my soft gaze wants to celebrate. Each morning reveals the quiet miracles that go unnoticed to the untamed eyes, and seek no fanfare to be celebrated.

The spring equinox and milder temperatures have kickstarted  intense labours in the fields needing to be prepared for this year’s crops. Big red tractors with oversized wheels have been furrowing the fields looking, from a distance, very much like a shuttle on the loom marrying the warp and weft to reveal the pattern. The long and tedious task of tilling turns up the winter weeds, brings the topsoil to the surface and yields large lumps of dark brown, luscious earth. The chunks are then broken down into finer dust before receiving the seeds which will grow into amazingly tall stalks of corn.

The plowing attracts all sorts of birds ready to sweep down behind the tractors and catch the first batch of engorged worms, snatched from their winter toils of tending to the soil.

The vast colonies of seagulls are the most impressive of the actors of this seasonal scene. They start their morning by flying inland from their costal shelters, their raucous cries alerting us of their presence. They first assemble in the nearby field, forming a disciplined congregation nonchalantly waiting for the invisible signal to move to the next phase. They remind me of crowds patiently waiting for a venue to open and welcome its patrons and punters. There is no visible sign indicating lift off that my eyes and observing mind can perceive; it simply occurs. The congregation then departs, disintegrating to become a vociferous and restless sea of gulls forming waves, rising and plunging behind the tractors, attentively following the epicentre of the upheavals, where the blades meet the soil.

In the distance of the eyes’ soft appraisal, the cloud of tightly compacted seagulls catches the naked spring light and becomes a brilliant white veil revealing, in real-time, a new landscape, another vision of perfectly synchronised collaborative work. On the horizon, the white veil harmoniously rises and dips above the naked earth exposing a moving space between the soil and the veil. What might this liminal space hold? What hidden treasures are momentarily exposed in this springtime dance celebrating life arising? A fertile interface! An evanescent and ephemeral frontier where generous streams of life can meet and merge, where countless seeds of life blend and crosspollinate trusting the acts of death from which life springs.  

My observations of the quiet miracle of intersubjective cooperation prefigure the next section of our odyssey with wholeness. In March we completed our explorations of the first wave of expansion: cleaning up. We now approach the second wave – growing up – where we will be first exploring the movements of expanding our awareness before presenting ourselves to the larger movements of shifting in perception and cognition. Expanded awareness comes from developing our senses with, for instance, augmented perceptiveness and polished sensitivities. Expanding is about paying attention to everything that arises in our experience when we consent to delve into the liminal spaces, the rims of intelligibility where darkness and light merge.

On this section of the odyssey, we learn to hold everything with compassionate equanimity and curiosity, not repudiating darkness, nor cleaving to light. The point of balance of seemingly opposed movements – equanimity – is held, and cradled, in the paschal mystery of life and death, as a single mystery, a moving internal symmetry with the seasonal swaying of spring as we tend to the soil and celebrate the protecting veil rising at dawn.