All we are?

“I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment’s gone. All my dreams pass before my eyes, a curiosity. Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind.”

~Kansas

In 2008 I woke up in the middle of the night; I heard this song playing and the words played perfectly verse after verse. The instruments played a tune I won’t easily forget. I got up, walked downstairs, all the while trying to remember the words that woke me. I needed to look up the song and hear it, to check if it was accurate with what I played in my head. I never can remember lyrics. That’s funny to me considering how much I appreciate them. But, this night, they floated through my head without mistake.

I found the song and played it to myself in the dark. It was chilling to me because I didn’t consciously repeat the song, the words almost had a life of their own and they woke me. And are we, after all, only dust in the wind?

Physically, maybe. But, in the important sense of the question, I venture to say no. ‘We.’ ‘All we are.’ Those words communicate more than a body. When I think of the word ‘I’, pertaining to myself… my self… I don’t think of the body. At any moment we are turning to dust. Quite literally, our skin cells flake, whether we see them or not, and they are carried off as dust. The body is nothing but what our spirit breathes into it. Without the breath, we are not. And breath comes from what exactly? Where does that come from? Who gave direction for that? No one. When we were born, our mother did not say, “breathe” and we obeyed. We did it because our spirit yearned to belong in our body and perform our life.

One who does not believe in God may argue that we are merely particles and cells and matter- substance of physical dimension only- the provable. When there is a person who denies God around me and they speak of their theory, I hear their argument, understand the angle from which they argue and direct their argument, and I listen. But all the while, I feel a pull in my deepest depth that ‘says’ this isn’t so. I know more than that exists because my body tells me and I listen more to the words rising from the part in me no one has given a label or medical definition than I do another mouth. This part of me is my guidance and when my existence is contributed to excellent and intellectual coincidence, I absorb the words and that guidance spits them out again. I wonder how some do not trust this part of their being (I do not attempt to convince another about their spiritual beliefs, as it is personal and being so, none of my business. I simply wonder.). It isn’t physically pinpointed, but it is there and to believe so takes bravery. One cannot make it simple for others and show them on a map of the body, or dissect an old body and show it to the witnessing eye. It cannot be done, because it is not there any longer in the dead, old body. It is the breath. The breath is with the life only, not the body.

So, our body, it may be dust, as dust goes. But, our spirit, our true life, is the wind that blows. One is matter vanishing and spreading to contribute to new creation. The other is all the while invisible but is the essence of creation. It moves and stirs and spins and it is what keeps the world turning and the universe expanding, never ceasing.

They both are. Evolution and God. But, one, only, gives evolution life.

Dust evolves into new beings. The wind is God. The wind is ‘we’.

*Side note:

My husband said, “You are asking for trouble, posting something religious.”

I said, “It’s not religious, it’s spiritual.”

I do not consider those two things synonymous. One can have religion and no spirituality and vice versa. This distinction is important to me.

One is man-made; one is not.

He responded, “I know. I’m just saying, people like to respond to things about their religion.”

And to this I can only say one thing. “It’s my blog about my views.”

These are thoughts in my head.