The Temple of Becoming

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi

Imagine, if you will, a temple. Full of worship, ritual, and awakening. A dwelling place of the gods, space, and time. Brimming with passion and potential. Holy walls that hold all that is sacred. This is a temple of pure consciousness, generative life force energy, creativity, eros. This is the temple of your life.

Also gathered there, are ones that have been there forever. Hiding in the shadows of the soul temple, there are immobile, fossilized statues stuck in historic ways of staying safe and protected. These collections of crystalized fear are resistant to change.

It is the task of the worshiper to clean the temple. To take up a broom and sweep the dust out of the rooms of thought and perspective. To open the doors to the immaculate heart space and let flow the river of grief and joy. To draw fresh water, gather rose petals, and light candles. The temple that is your life, like all sacred spaces, needs tender attention and care. When the light of change shines in, a journey of spirit begins.

Sometimes this change burns through us like holy fire, and we are left as a forest after being licked by flames, to wait patiently for seeds to take root and push through the now fecund soil.
Other times, change burns through the world around us, and we must learn to become rain.

Being able to stay with energy that is in a state of transition is the practice of surrender to sacred change. Change eludes human manipulation, and therefore is coded as sacred. It is the gossamer name we drape over the mystery to give it shape and meaning. Many ancient traditions (and modern psychology) recognize change as the only constant.

“God is change.” - Octavia E Butler

Indeed, the Buddhist teaches that there is no permanent self to cling to. That all exists in a state of impermanence. Even our spiritual powers are living beings, and thus are subject to the forces of change and mortality: to grow old, to die, and to be reborn in another form. All is energy, and energy cannot be created or destroyed, it only changes form.

Life is made of these shifting and changing seasons and cycles that fill and empty, rise and fall, just like the wild places around us. Like the ritual of the sun and the moon. Like the tides. Your garden. This is exactly the alchemy that allows things to emerge, fall back, and die away, all in their own right time, over and over again. This is the most natural law of the universe, without ceasing.

Dear hearts, it is not change that causes us to suffer. But our resistance to it.
Of course change can be devastatingly hard, and can certainly be painful. This too, is an inevitability.

And yet.

With such tectonic shifting, one cannot help but emerge from the reverie with a sense that the world has been enlarged; that the lens you have been peering through and calling it “life” has been wiped clean by the hand of God, and you wake up.

As the saying goes, this is a journey without a destination.
There is nowhere to arrive. It is a continuously flowing river into the ocean of time. A temple that stands forever in the clouds of unknowing, that requires ceaseless tending. The invitation is to inhabit this temple fully, and expansively. To romance the mystery, and let yourself be seduced by all that you don’t yet know. To evict the fearful statues, and throw down fresh water and rose petals in the holy temple you call your life.