Walking into the Sunlight

HARRIETTE MELDRIM HILL

That morning I climbed to the hilltop house to say good-bye to my friend, who was leaving for Florida. It was autumn, and my feet rustled through dry leaves, golden and russet, as they lay thickly on the ground. But when I reached the brow of the hill and started up the driveway through the beautiful garden, I saw that my friend had gone. Heavy curtains covered the windows, the garage door was closed, choice plants were sheltered by leafy cuttings, and birds hovered around empty feeders. All activity seemed to be in a state of suspension. The garden had been bedded down for cold weather.

At home, not long before, my husband had died. Now as I looked around my friend's garden, it suddenly became clear to me that the body my husband had left behind was like this place. My friend had forsaken her mountain house for her winter place, but I knew that she would be just as busy there with her gardening as she had been here. My husband had left what had appeared as his physical dwelling place for a different state of consciousness, but as I stood in the deserted garden, I understood clearly that his activity had not stopped.

Inanimate body couldn't be, and had never been, man, because it expresses no activity, no intelligence. Then I saw that the inert, mindless body had never been man, the expression of God's being, but was only a counterfeit. As though touched by a shaft of sunlight, my thought became illumined with the reality of being. Life is eternal, because God is Life. And man forever expresses eternal Life. Man lives always in Spirit, not in matter. Nothing can stop man from endlessly expressing God in living, loving, knowing, seeing, hearing, acting, being.

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