Serendipity is a specific group of experiences that arise for each of us regardless of morality, life position, fate, or belief. Serendipity comes to us because we are alive. It proves the larger life and its astonishing coordinating capacity.
We are not alone and in fact we are alive inside a larger experience of life growing itself – and each of us.
The experience of serendipity is so direct, neutral and specific to the conscious and unconscious circumstances of our lives that it seems to be an answer ahead of its question or prayer. Too, each experience is so personal, immediate, and practical that we are left stunned and humbled for its direct contact.
Its experiences are not religious ones – serendipity lasts but a moment and then retreats. We are left feeling gifted, changed, connected, without need for more contact and scratching our heads.
Serendipity can reach us through plants, weather, insects, birds, animals, people, objects, movement, injury, difficulty, a sequence of unrelated events, and myriad other variables that when combined confound our imaginations.
Who or what could have fashioned such a complete response to such hidden needs? If we imagine we know the answer to this question, we will have just turned away from the chance to grow into serendipity’s reach.
It seems we are wired to co-exist with the un- and the not-yet-known. As long as we are willing to stay inside our design, we will experience the immense reward of collaboration with earth’s nature.
Serendipity plants us directly inside the organizing source of growth. We are taken in and our outward focus is changed. It may be our singular and most direct experience of encountering the force that sustains life.
Serendipity engages both the material and the nonmaterial worlds and creates an experience out of seemingly unrelated, a-causal components.
Its most compelling aspect is that its reach is specific to our practical lives, our minds and our emotions with a direct action that leaves us changed, opened to more.
Serendipity gives us an experiential, momentary glimpse of the absolute unity of life and its continuous flow that includes and makes room for each of us in our specific circumstances. And its direct reach into our circumstances reminds us we are needed, just as we are.
Because we find these experiences riveting and memorable we are repeatedly persuaded to count them as part of life, albeit its mystery.
It is possible that what reaches us in serendipitous experiences as glimpse can widen into landscape in a quiet experience of our perception opening enough to let in what has always been “beyond the divide.”
This possibility comes with its own doubling agent, that is, the more moments we consider life’s unity, the more our awareness of it opens and in the gentlest of ways.
An inner stability takes hold and more of nature – ours and the larger – comes into view, urgency evaporates, replaced by a constant awareness of being inside a flow that is deeper than time and wider than space.
The tremor of life’s entirety moves us and all of life in ways that provide, include and connect even all that we are not yet capable of describing through language.
As life’s unity becomes visible, and separation is allowed to fall away through bringing in what is not yet known to our perception, we become freer to live life’s impulse to provide, include and connect in increasingly satisfying ways.
With this freedom arises a daily and self-renewing frequency that brings its own peace, a peace that we’d once only imagined to be part of the hereafter.
Excerpted from Earth as our Ground.