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inspiration


The Luminous Web Why We Are One by Barbara Brown Taylor


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Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.


~ Chief Seattle, 1855 W


hat I see is an infinite web of relationship, flung across the vastness of space like a


luminous net. It is made of energy, not thread. As I look, I can see light mov- ing through it as a pulse moves through veins. What I see “out there” is no different from what I feel inside. There is a living hum that might be coming from my neurons, but might just as well be coming from the furnace of the stars. When I look up at them, there is a small commotion in my bones as the ashes of dead stars that house my mar- row rise up like metal filings toward the magnet of their living kin.


Where am I in this picture? I am


all over the place. I am up there, down here, inside and outside of my skin. How could I ever be alone? I am part of a web that is pure relationship, with energy available to me that has been around since the universe was born. Where is God in this picture? God


is all over the place. God is up there, down here, inside and outside of my


skin. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light—not captured in them, as if any one of those concepts was more real than what unites them—but revealed in that singular, vast net of rela- tionship that animates everything that is. It is not enough for me to pro- claim that God is responsible for all of this unity. Instead, I want to proclaim that God is the unity—the very energy, the very intelligence, the very elegance and passion that make it all go. This is the God who is not somewhere, but everywhere; the God who may be prayed to in all directions at once. The “I am who I am,” in whom everything else abides. For the moment, we see through a


glass darkly. We live in the illusion that we are all separate “I ams.” When the fog finally clears, we shall know that there is only One.


Excerpted from The Luminous Web, by Barbara Brown Taylor, with permission of Cowley Publications.


natural awakenings December 2012 25


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