Today I felt my Beloved in the soil under my feet and in the bark on the trees.

In the television series Cosmos, narrated by Carl Sagan, two galaxies are depicted colliding and merging.  I watched this scene projected onto my wall at night.  The image filled my living room like a window looking out into the universe.

With his characteristic spiritual awe, Sagan remarked on the enormity of the destruction, and my mind was drawn to the place of love in the impermanence of form.

Think of a person who evokes in you the deepest and most poignant unconditional love, the kind that feels eternal, the kind that transcends form.  A child.  A lover.  Someone with whom you experienced a psychic bond that dissolves your sense of self, cracks open your heart, and reveals the infinite light hidden in your cells.

Look at the colliding galaxies.  Watch the innumerable stars and planets thrust through space explode, die, and reform.  And as you watch, think on this: Somewhere within that movement of debris is the dust of two lovers just like you.

Maybe they lived for thousands of years. Maybe they flew in the atmosphere of a gas giant. They may have stepped from one world to another, traveling between solar systems. Were they blue or green, hard or soft, blind or capable of seeing ultraviolet light?

Whatever they were, they loved one another. What does that mean? Their awareness, which once seemed so private, encompassed something outside themselves and became more.  They looked so deeply into a particular form that they saw the whole cosmos reflected, recognized the original light, and fell in love.

It felt eternal and real to them.  It was real.  It is real.  From billions of light years away, watching it all, the particular slice of time matters little, and where all time comes together, all that existed is there.

In this slice, there among the massive stars is their dust floating in space, burning or freezing, the sacred ash of beings who loved.

Today I sat in an office on campus with someone I was once madly in love with.  I was so in love with him, every time I looked at his face, it visibly glowed.  I could taste his light on my tongue and feel his energy touching every cell.  He filled my awareness so powerfully, and I was so helplessly infatuated, that I wanted nothing more than his well being.  I lost my ego that year, three years ago when I was ending my marriage and he was just starting his.  For that I owe him a great debt.  Sometimes, I wish I could tell him.

His face no longer glows, and thank goodness for that.  I could not have endured much longer with that intensity of adoration for one particular form, but I still love him, and I remember when I first felt his awareness, the first verified psychic experience that graced my life.

After seeing him on campus, I took a walk through the cattails along the lake.  A hidden trail coated with wood chips and twigs meandered through the trees.

I thought of him and remembered how badly I had wanted to be close to him.  I imagine my affection was obvious.  Now, he is far away.

What does it mean to love someone who is far away?  What exactly do I love?  Something he evoked in me?  An unrealistic fantasy?  No, it was something else.

Years ago, I breathed him in, and when I exhaled, he was still within me.  Love.  I watched his wedding, and afterward I spent many an hour visualizing he and his new wife doing well, glowing, flourishing, encircled with string lights.  Then, for fear of causing harm, I withdrew myself from their lives.

What happens when love persists while bodies change, part, or die?

Our sacred dust.  I remembered the colliding galaxies from Cosmos.  I looked at the dirt under my feet and wrapped my arm around a tree.  The sacred dust is everywhere!  Lovers under my feet, beside me, stretching out across the lake, and on and on.

Suddenly I felt him there.  Not him exactly.  Something beyond him yet containing him.  Grief disappeared completely.  My heart stopped aching, and I felt satiated, like tasting pie.  Filled.  An energy surged up through my body, making me giddy, and I felt as though I were touching something eternal.

All that exists in the realm of form is dust, dust, dust, and somehow this pure awareness moves each ash, animates it like a puppet, and plays out a cosmic love scene.

I felt as though I were every piece of dust.  My awareness seems to encompass everything.  And at the same time, I am not a single piece of dust.  My awareness is not dust any more than my mind is an object in a dream.  Somewhere outside the realm of dust, we are all one mind dreaming.  We are not made of star dust… the star dust is made of us.

The following video illustrates how sound vibrations animate a cornstarch solution.  It offers a wonderful analogy for the power of awareness over dust.  We are not the cornstarch.  We are the sound.

Your body is just a cornstarch form.  Your awareness is beyond it.  How beautiful is this existence!  Lightly touch your arm.  How many great lovers are in the cells of your skin?  And how many of your dead skin cells have sloughed off and fed the Earth?

Does it make sense to draw boundaries?  This body, that body?

Open to your own pure awareness and ask yourself, where does it end?  And is it only yours?

That deep unconditional love that moves you like an ocean current does not die in the stellar collisions.  It is the force that moves the dust.  It is you.