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- New Universe Story Watercolor #1
A Tree of Life
1. A Tree of Life
This is the first painting I did after my breakthrough in understanding
the depth of human belonging to the earth and universe, including especially
to the invisible "within" permeating the entire visible world. This
awakening to belonging so fully and deeply gave meaning at a felt level and
also intellectually as I learned the remarkable story of the origins of human
beings and the natural world of which we are so fully part. I felt I understood
in a new way the traditional image of the tree of life. It is one tree with
many parts that are all integral to it in the same manner the earth is known
to be a whole because from the simpler material of the early earth there
has been a differentiation into the great diversity of life of the earth.
Similarly, the many parts of the vast cosmos that appear to be separate are
part of a unified whole because they all exist only through the elementary
particles that emerged in the first epoch of the unfolding of the universe.
A dimension of this unity lies in the unseen generative ground that sustains
the visible world, moment by moment. The light shining through the geometric
pattern is to suggest the within, or perhaps a dimension of the vast within,
the pervasive, numinous reality in, with and under everything. Now I could
be confident that this within is part of me and that it does not go away.
Contemporary spiritual author Andrew Harvey writes in, The Way of Passion,
A Celebration of Rumi that "you can only truly be at home in this
reality when you know the reality that is continually emanating it."