Dance was my way of praying, of listening, of celebrating, it wasmy way of being as beautiful as the life around me. Now I feel hideous, unloved, abandoned. I lie down and sob and I feel a screeching hunger for mil, for some essence to flow from the sky and reach down through my shattered mind and reconnect me to warmth and calm. And very gradually it happens. The life in the trees and grass and the warm rocks enters my body and joins me to them. One morning, I sit up and see the incandescent trees in silent communion with each other, immersed in love. This is the world, I think, the real world. Whatever happens to me, the world is still this luminous mystery.
The entirety of the contemplative life is grounded in the love of God. Without that love there would be no prayer ... nothing at all. This love calls into being -- creates, quickens, gives life to -- all that is. This love binds together each one to the other, and in the end binds us to the Source of that love, draws us back into the One whom we never really left, draws us back into God. In that returning we discover that there never existed a division between us and that ... the whole of life is in truth one continuous mystical experience because it has always been suffused with God's love.