ONE LIFE

By Franklin Mukakanga

There is only one ‘water’

There is only one ‘fire’
There is only one ‘light’
There is only one ‘life’

No matter how many the rivers how deep the oceans and the seas, ‘water’ is
one.
No matter what the fuel or the manner in which ignited, ‘fire’ is one.
Whether from a candle, coaxed from a chemical reaction or streaming from a
galaxy far away ‘light’ is one.
Regardless of the expression, in creature great or small, animate or
inanimate, spiritual or physical, ‘life’ is one.

And as the water of the river is as verily water as the water of the sea and all
that water is one, so the life expressed in you and me, the fishes, the birds
and the angels and the trees and the dogs is one. And as you cannot say any
water is not ‘as truly water’ as the water in a faraway lake, so you cannot say
the life that is in you is not as truly life as that out of which you were created.
The Creator has shared and continues to share life, and this life just is. There
are no qualitative distinctions in the life itself. There is no ‘good’ life and
‘bad’ life. Life, like fire, like light, like water, just is. And it is one.

The problem arises when one feels the need to differentiate between source
and stream. The fact that we get our earthly light from the sun doesn’t make
the light we see any less truly light as that light we have not yet beheld that
is the very essence of our Source, whom we have named God. The life that
flows within and through us is the life that animates our Source—same
‘stuff’, different expressions. What our source is, we are. That’s why it is said
that we are made in the image of God. What did you think it meant? Some
dilute, impure distortion?

What if our ‘finity’—our mortality—is our canvas, the medium in which we

express our perpetually growing knowing? What if we are perfect as we are—
considering ourselves flawed only because we do not meet our own highest
aspirations and because we know we can be more? Is that our sin—the
knowledge of our potential and our quest for its fulfillment? If it is in our
nature to always seek to be more is there any greater perfection than the
moment, when in the next one we will seek to be more, to know more, and
when whatever present ‘perfection’ we think we have attained will be
overtaken by the vision, the impulse, that drives us to even greater
‘perfection’? And will there ever be a time when we cease to evolve—a point
when the universe says, ‘There is no more to be known, and thus no more
growing to be done’ and thus attain a static, rather than dynamic, perfection?
When one ‘side’ wins and the other yields? Or will we be in flux in
perpetuity—hungering, being filled, hungering for something new, being
filled with something else, some new experience, some new height of bliss,
some new awareness, only to start all over again at the next higher level of
consciousness and recognition?

We grow. We change. We learn. We become. That is our purpose—to be the

knowable expression of the infinite God in whom everything is. All that we
call good. All that we call evil. All that we understand. All that we don’t. We
play out the drama of the various impulses, urges and desires that come with
the human experience. We reap and we sow. We laugh and we cry. We live
and we die. We graduate to the next class in our journey towards a more
complete representation of the perfection of our Source. To be a purer fire, a
living water a brighter light, to manifest the one life. Know you are at one
with God. Recognize that fire, that light, that living water, that life within you,
and celebrate it.
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