Divinity in All Things
An intro to upcoming stories from Spain
The sky and sunshine above Spain’s Iberian peninsula appeared limitless on this Saturday afternoon. Their bigness gave my jet lag a lifeline to hold onto. As we soared out away from the southern coastline, sunshine flooded the sky as far as the eye could see. Bright warm light bathed rich blue airspace. Clouds had an imagination of their own, forming wispy faces, statues, sculptures, paintings and columns, as if they were children building stories out of clay. An entire world seemed to exist up here in the late summer sky . We marveled at it from the window seats. The jet engines roared with excitement. Perhaps the Air France airplane coffee was strong. Maybe the jet lag was intoxicating. But the ensemble felt enchanted. Big. Vast. Spiritual. Divine.
Onboard the flight, I came across an essay All is Divine: A Sikh Perspective on Non-Discrimination by Simran Jeet Singh. The essay, and its many references to Sikh scripture and philosophy, center around the idea that divinity exists in all things:
Divinity in All Nature
Divinity in All People
Divinity in All Moments
Nature, space & time, big moments and small, inanimate objects and human beings, all beings—all are distinct entities or
“beads bound together by the same divine string.”
Sikh wisdom challenges us to “learn to see divinity in everything we see.” The ability to do so, it teaches, has a profound ability to transform—people & their trajectory in the world, nations & their successes, and the texture of the moments in our lives.
My encounter with Singh’s essay, with this idea of divinity in all things, arrived at a serendipitous time: on the cusp of six days in Spain. The trip offered a chance to experience nature, to experience people, to experience moments. Beyond the immediate appeal of indulgence and departure from the routine, travel is a chance to engage both with the world and with ideas. And an opportunity to strengthen our mental foundations, foundations often tested by the varied mental states we find ourselves in abroad. Expansive. Jet lagged. Blissful. Homesick. Jubilant. Hungover. Connected. Lonely. Travel shakes a champagne bottle and opens it right in our face. In the fizz, we find an opportunity for self-discovery and self improvement as much as we do self-indulgence.
With this Sikh idea bubbling in my mind at the beginning of the trip, I found myself writing a consistent stream of Apple notes over the next nine days. The world came to life. Details jumped off the page. Nature as the stage. People as characters. Moments as their plot. Nature, people and moments--together in a cohesive narrative. The whole thing indeed felt divine. In looking for the divinity, there divinity was. Hiding in plain sight. As a lifelong friend wisely said, it is easier than we think to drop into the magic of the moment.
On the trip, and now afterwards, I felt compelled to document the texture of this divinity. To wrestle with it creatively, to etch it in (digital) stone and return to it later. Above all, could writing down these experiences cultivate and strengthen my own ability to see divinity, to experience divinity, going forward? Is it all that bad to want more of a good thing if the good thing is actually a good thing?
So beneath the canopy of these goals, I’ve authored three separate pieces--each with short stories and observed details, that together assemble the Sikh idea of Divinity in All Things:
Divinity in All Nature
Divinity in All People
Divinity in All Moments
Each piece to follow here. Weaving these together into a single piece of writing would create an artifact that is long and winding. Probably arrogantly so. Brevity is admirable. It is good to break down big things into small steps.
In writing these stories, I come away now, as I did then, strengthened by the belief that divinity exists all around us. Both in the extraordinary moments--sunsets, jagged cliffs, turquoise sea full of fish--and the ordinary ones---conversations with strangers, frustrating rental car situations and coca-cola marketing slogans. In the extraordinary, divinity is readily apparent-- awe and wonder smack us in the face. In the ordinary, we may have to work a little harder to see it--unearthing treasure in the dirt.
As I write a week or two after the journey through Spain, I am awestruck by the power source inside this Sikh concept of Divinity in All Things and grateful to have encountered it on the flight into the Balearic Islands. We often say seeing is believing or believing is seeing. Both work together. Through both sight and belief, Divinity in All Things appears capable of illuminating a through line in our world--a magnetic thread tying together nature, people, and all moments. And this thread makes the world feel expansively big and wonderfully small. Or at least it did for six days in Spain.
I hope you enjoy the stories to come. And the divinity all around you in your life.
