The inner landscape!

It was while watching this scenic landscape recently, Anna and I felt encouraged to create an overview of the inner landscape of our life of seven decades!

There are some difficult experiences which stand out. If those experiences keep occupying the attention and focus, then the gladness arising from the view of the landscape is obscured. 

I have had seasons in life when some difficult experiences absorbed me and overshadowed the rest of the rich and fulfilling scenes of the inner landscape. 

The photos of the landscape above represent a good blend of all that was rich and abundant in nature. 

I felt spoken to, which enabled me to have a telescopic view of the inner paranoia. No single event or few events were decisive or defining, but the coming together of all the life events became formative!

I take time now to have a distant view of life events, rather than an analytical or incisive view! In so doing, there is a shift from recalling the waves and high tides in life, to looking at the shore to look for corals, shells and sea treasures, which the high tides would have brought! 

It is like watching the turbulent sea and concluding that all of the sea is turbulent. Go beneath twenty feet the sea, it is is calm and still!

That is how life has taken us through the life events. Even amidst the turbulence at some seasons, the inner landscape is poised to experience the comfort of stillness and wholeness. 

A mother who recalled how devastated she felt when her one month old son was diagnosed to have an intracranial haemorrhage with signs of hemiparesis! But she felt composed hoping for recovery. Now five years later, he is a bubbling joy to the family, bringing fullness of childhood and school readiness! The fading remnant of that neonatal event is evident only to a searching eye. As parents have been fully immersed in exploring the learning journey with him, they look back to feel thankful and not at all regretful!

To become friendly towards our inner landscape is a choice we have to make. No one event should take precedence over the overview of the landscape. The joy of living is an asset to live fully! 

I wish I can become more celebrant of life events! Every time a presbyter celebrates the Eucharist, the attention is on the gift of life that God brought to humankind through the risen Christ! The suffering gets subsumed into the joyfulness of life and hope that carry us beyond!

The inner landscape is a melody of life's different tunes, which make them to be a symphony!

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)