I have a Sufi teacher, who like many mystics, has that cute, disheveled, drunken quality of being totally in love with God. He once looked me in the face over dinner, Chinese food on his shirt, and said, “Be a blithering fool for God, for beauty and truth.”
Yes please!
He talks about how God has given us desires in order to experience the world. God wants us to be somebody, to discover what delights us, to find pleasure in this amazing Creation.
Do I know the mind of God? No. But what fun to orient from this perspective, to try it on.
So many of us sell our lives too small. We forget that our selves and our reality are much more vast than we realize. When I was in Divinity School, I learned that the 99 Names of God actually represent infinite names and qualities of the Divine. There is a wild abundance to reality, which for some reason, most of us only have access to a tiny sliver of.
A lot of my work and play is about accessing a wider range of being, which is also—in my opinion—accessing a bit more of the everythingness of the divine.
There is a Hindu creation myth that the Divine, the Absolute, played and played and created the whole world. The word Lila in Sanskrit is a way to describe all reality as the outcome of creative play. That makes play the ultimate source of reality! To me, one of the great truths in this is that when we play and experiment we create our world, we change reality, and the story of what is possible. Instead of feeling at the mercy of things, we begin to co-create with life.
For me, play and experimentation is a sacred task. It’s holy work to explore the many aspects of the self and the range of what is possible in relationship. And of equal importance, it’s just plain fun.
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photo from McGill Library on Unsplash