It was a glorious day of full sunshine, although too late in the season to rescue another disastrous English summer. I could feel the sun’s warmth on me as I sat in a park, waiting for some friends to show. They were late.
Just then, I felt a scratching on my neck. Instinctively, I brushed the area, and a ladybird fell onto the table in front of me. Concerned that I had damaged it, I pushed it gently with my nail. Nothing. Then again. Still nothing. After a third nudge, the ladybird started walking away from my finger.
It looked none the worse for its experience, and I became fascinated by my unexpected companion, come to keep me company in my vigil.
Then, suddenly, it opened its wings and was gone. I was alone again on my park bench.
Many of us carry the heavy burden of grief and loss. It is so unbearable that it weighs us down. As I explain in my book, Time-Light, we not only become sad, we are the sadness.
But in that moment when the ladybird flew away, I realised there was essentially no difference between us: we were both expressions of the same life energy.
That energy is without end and without limit. And because there is no end and no limit, the ladybird hadn’t really left at all. It couldn’t.
When we can really see that – when we can taste that truth – we also see that the sense of grief and loss we carry around with comes from a personal perspective, a point in time and space etched into the infinite and eternal.
And when we can truly see there can be no coming or going and that we are an expression of the infinite, our grief goes, too. Just a bitter-sweet sadness remains. We become Time-Light.
As I looked up, I saw my friends hurrying towards me.