Of life and love, this world is but a garden. Fruits sprout and are picked by curious hands to be discovered and savored, explored and understood, tasted and enjoyed. The garden grows around us, and we are the garden and we are the fruit. All that's left to do is recognize the beauty and be one with it. Rest easy on tired legs when longing for the flavors of the heart. It's love. In our blood, in our souls. In the ripples of water, in the strokes of heat from the sun, in the quiet footsteps of a rabbit, in the push for existence that drives a blade of grass towards the sky. Savor the fruit on your tongue and allow the love to sweeten your taste buds.

I remember the first time I experienced oneness. I was in a valley of boulders in Bishop, CA -- the Happy Boulders -- nestled in the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains. I climbed out of the valley and walked some distance out into the middle of the dusty, dry land. There I sat and gazed and wondered in my surroundings. The mountains stood with a booming presence. Jagged snow-covered peaks of rock towering with majestic grace over the land. I felt them form in eruptions of force, a timeless age ago, sculpted by the same force that sculpted my eyes. I looked at them and they looked back at me, and thus we were entranced by the reflections of ourselves that we saw in each other. The bluebird skies above held only a tiny crescent moon above the ridgeline. Not a cloud in the sky. Only the vast expanse of nothing and everything that holds the cradle of our existence. I could feel the stars behind the veil of the afternoon sky. Always there. Always burning. Creating worlds and destroying them in an instant. A black crow circled effortlessly overhead to cast a steady shadow on the land.

I picked up a weathered rock and drove it into the soil, carving a piece of this land by the stroke of my hand, and all those who had picked up this rock before me flashed through my mind. Their stories are forever carved into it's shape. And the collection of the great wondrous story that's been created over the millenia, that now brought this rock to my hand, flowed through me with meaning and clarity. Neither the rock, nor myself, had chosen each other in that moment. Forces beyond our control brought us together. We sat there in unity, a part of something larger than life itself. One day, this rock will erode away into tiny particles of sand and be lost in the windswept dust of the dry land. One day, my body will cease to exist in the form it takes now, and will dissolve back into this land as microscopic particles of energy. And though my current form will be gone, the energy will always remain. This manifestation of myself -- I, the writer of these words -- is just one in an infinite spectrum of possibility. A mountain, a smile, a river, a snail, a train, a traffic light, a candle, a tree, a toothpick, a mushroom, an amoeba, a cloud, a promise, a poem, a red giant, an Earth, a dream. Everything breathes from a foundation of energy at it's core. This energy takes form and dissolves, continually, in a state of flow that we call time, within a process that we call evolution, moving towards an idea that we don't understand, and yet it is everything that we are. In this flow nothing is permanent. Nothing lasts forever. The only real and true certainty that we have is the state of the current moment. It is here that all exists in harmony, unified, as One.

Gratitude spread her wings before me and at once I was home in the universe. I sat there for a long while that day engulfed in everything that is and was and will be, content with the knowledge that this world in it's entirety, and myself, would never be the same again.