EPIPHANY!

After a challenging four months in Lockdown, I was one of the first people to travel to Greece when the borders opened. I really missed nature, as I do not have a terrace or outdoor space in my Florence apartment. I really understand now the importance and power of nature to still the mind and soothe the heart. 

If another Lockdown comes to Italy, I will be more proficient in bringing the tranquil nature mind into my home space regardless of proximity to a forest or ocean. 

As I sat on this beautiful beach in Lefkada last month, I pondered beauty, bliss and tranquility amidst a world of madness. I wondered if these states exist within me or outside of me or both. I convinced myself that beauty and tranquility can "only" arise within, since the inner state as I understand from my Dharma studies produces the relationship with the outer world. I recalled as a youngster there were times at our cottage north of Toronto, where I felt tortured being in nature with mosquitos and my dad making me prune thousands of trees and doing endless hours of gardening in sweltering heat. In this context, nature produced agitation in the system so I concluded nature itself cannot consistently and reliably always produce a good state. It is dependant on the mood/emotion in the moment and that is an inner cause.

I know that when I use the word "only" to describe truth, I am usually way off base. As I proudly convinced myself that beauty is determined from within, I looked up and saw a sweet little sailboat, shown in this photo, poetically gliding across the glowing horizon of Milos beach right through a mesmerizing beam of radiating sunlight. My inner world lit up like a sky of exploding stars. For a moment, the inner and the outer became one beauty. Non-Duality. 

I realized, sometimes, the outer world can remind us of the beauty within and sometimes the inner can remind us of the beauty of the outer. 

When the two become ONE, that is what some may call Magic or as the Greeks say: Epiphany!