Friday, May 24, 2013

Blue

The blue sky will always overwhelm me with a sense of power and possibility, with the intensity of its blueness opening up my mind to experiences and feelings and emotions that were somehow denied the incredibleness of existence. Opening yourself up to the blue sky and making yourself vulnerable to the frightening possibilities of eternity can put you at the very edge of your compass in a serendipitous place that allows for the free flowing forces of cosmic energy and the powerful exuberance of the universe to intercede and interact on your behalf.

Living in Colorado most of my life, I think that the blueness of the sky became a background for a context of living daily life, a default for the semingly unending existence of day in and day out. Colorado has plenty of blue sky and sunshine, even during the bleak of the winter season, and so the mind integrates that into the fabric of our daily lives. We don't notice the subtle power of the blue sky and the sensitivity of our vision has become so numb to the impact that we can't even comprehend the possibility of what the sky opens up to us and within us.

The first time that I realized the tremendous impact of the blue sky on my life was a time when I was riding my bicycle down a lonely, dusty dirt road in Uganda, a country located in east Africa. The magnetism of my destination pulled me desperately along the road, as I looked down at the dust forlornly being pulled up by the tires on my bike and occasionally glanced backward to check the distance and to calculate how far I had come since my last glance backward only a minute ago. It wasn't very far. The Elephant Bush, or what I thought was Elephant Bush, along the sides of the road had grown so high that the leaves seemed to be waving in the wind, the tips sharply piercing the sky as they moved back and forth in a rhythm that forced me to stop and to get off my bike and listen.

With the sweat dripping off of my face like tears, I started to walk along the dirt road and my eyes followed the long, sinewy Elephant Grass to the tips of the everlasting blue. It was a supreme moment when my heart flowed openly, freely, and indeterminately into the blue open space in front of me, juxtaposed so eloquently with the green of the earthy grass. I had physically stopped my body with the swirling dust embracing me, but the more I looked into the blue sky, the more I was awakened to the sense of a new dimension where impossibility and possibilty were melded into one distinct and overwhelming feeling of awe. Embraced by the blue, I envisioned the life of my dreams created and reincarnated in a cycle of infinite possibility with the texture and feel of an existence that was beyond existence.

Maybe I was feeling particularly unusual that day, maybe it was the intensity of the African sun, maybe it was the dry dirt that covered my skin like dried cocoa, but the intersection of my emotions with the blue sky happening at that single instant of solitude while walking my bicycle down the lonely dirt road forever changed my life in a way that nothing else really has. It wasn't only the experience of becoming fully aware of the beauty of the universe that changed the way that I envisioned my life in the world, but it was most significantly the tortuous act of becoming vulnerable to the incredibleness the blue sky symbolized to me. The exhilaration of the energy that routed itself within my body elevated me to such great height that everything, even my hopes and dreams, were transformed from the incomprehensibly impossible to the magnificent miracle of being born.

My wish for you and for everyone is the wish for a great expanse of blue sky, extending beyond the horizon of your limitations and crippling beliefs about how your life should be or who you should become. For me, the blue sky will always remind me of that day in Uganda when the sky unfurled before me the insight that possibility and potentiality were powerful forces in the movement of my life. When you are no longer afraid of the unimaginable depth of the blue, then you can begin to see the beautiful creations that infuse your life with love and positive energy everyday.

So, now it's time to stop being afraid of the blue sky; it's time to stop being afraid of learning about yourself; it's time to stop being afraid of the "what if's" and the possibilities. Learning about your HIV status doesn't have to be a frightening experience, nor does it have to decimate your possibilities, your dreams, your hopes. Just take a look at the blue sky....