Cocoon Dwellers

Most of our lives are lived in a sort of cocoon. Antigua contains shattered husks from the past. In a day, the husk was shattered and everything changed for them. I wonder how the people of Antigua felt in 1773 when an earthquake destroyed all their magnificent buildings.

The sides of the cocoon are, to an extent, the circumstances that surround me and my actions ‘out there’. The cocoon also includes the body that I ride around in, the ideas and memories in my head, my feelings, my hopes, my fears….everything I can conceive of is part of my cocoon. How do I know this? I know it because the cocoon has expanded at times, and I have found  myself (metaphorically speaking) able to spread my wings in an expanded context.

Please don’t imagine I have had some sort of conversion on the road to Damascus. I have no interest in following any religion, and if there exists a God he/she/it is as far beyond my comprehension as the beginning and end of the universe. However, the people of Guatemala have great reverence for their beliefs, their churches and their religious practices. I have always been fascinated by things like that. I felt it years ago in India and again in Thailand and Burma. Wordsworth and Thoreau found it in nature. There is “something far more deeply interfused.”  Like a rainbow it does not exist separately ‘out there’ nor is it simply a matter of imagination. I took the photo of the volcano with the cross in the foreground with the idea that inner and outer reflect back and forth. Perhaps the experience the Christos is something far more deeply interfused; something that belongs to all humanity since the beginning of time. We may think that, with all our money and our civilized ways, we are superior to these superstitious indigenous people in a ‘3rd world’ country. What if we are mistaken? What if we with our materialistic, mechanistic power and knowledge are ripe for being taught a lesson by the volcano?