The Ripples of Being
Here in the morning light, as traffic hums beyond the window and coffee drips into the pot, we might consider what the mystics knew: that emptiness teems with possibility. A man named Meister Eckhart once spoke of a desert within the divine, though he might just as well have been describing the space between heartbeats, between breaths, between the moment we reach for another person and the moment our fingers touch.
Sarah stands at her kitchen window, washing dishes. She doesn’t know – how could she? – that her small kindness yesterday (a dollar pressed into a homeless woman’s palm, along with a smile that said I see you) has already begun its journey through the world. The woman bought coffee and spoke to the barista with renewed dignity, who then carried that moment of grace home to her son.
We are, all of us, living in Julian of Norwich’s hazelnut. The entire universe contained in something so small you could close your fist around it. Scientists would later call this quantum entanglement, this way, everything touches everything else, but the mystics (like Julian) always knew. They understood how a prayer whispered in a desert cave might emerge as a song in a Manhattan apartment centuries later.
Look closely at your hands. Really look at them. Teresa of Avilia once said these were the only hands God had now – yours, mine, the barista’s, the homeless woman’s. Divine love wearing human skin, though we forget this most days, caught up in mortgage payments, grocery lists, and whether we remembered to feed the cat.
What would Thomas Merton say if he could see us now, each of us walking around “shining like the sun” while staring at our phones? We are more necessary than we imagine. More beautiful. Even now, as you read these words, something shifts in the universe. A quantum of consciousness changes state. A letter forms on the tongue of someone you’ll never meet in a language you don’t speak, carrying forward some essential part of you.
We live in a world of invisible threads. See how they glisten in the morning light, strung between buildings, between centuries, between hearts. Every act of kindness a stone dropped in still water, the ripples moving outward forever. Every moment of presence a seed planted in soil we cannot see.
Walk gently then, through your ordinary Tuesday. Let the mystics whisper their secrets in your ear: that nothing is truly separate, that love moves like light through the universe, that even your smallest gestures participate in the great dance of being. You’ll never know all the lives you’ve touched, all the stories you’ve entered. That’s part of the mystery too – this holy unknowing, this faithful continuing on.
Tonight, someone will dream a dream that began in the corner of your smile. Tomorrow, a child will find courage in the echo of your laughter. We are all just walking each other home, as Rumi said, though the path spirals through time and space in ways we cannot follow.
Remember this, as you finish your coffee, as you step out into the world: you are necessary. Your presence matters. The universe bends itself around your being in ways no equation can capture. Live with this awareness, if you can. Love with this generosity. Move through your days knowing that each moment ripples outward into infinity, carrying your light forward into futures you cannot imagine but somehow, mysteriously, help to create.
Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham
