One summer, during our stay, I wrote in my journal:
We started a fire on the rocks in front of cabin four last evening and watched the daylight colors reflecting on Lake Superior slowly change into pinks and lavenders with gray clouds as a backdrop. The reflection of the sunlight on the clouds caused ‘God rays’. The egg shaped moon rose before the dark enveloped the sky, sending its familiar path of moonbeams across the lake directly to the shore below our fire.
We have experienced this occurrence of moonbeams dancing on the watery path many times as we sat on the rocky shore of Lake Superior in front of cabin four as well as from other locations along the North Shore. We have sat quietly meditating on the moon and the moonbeams and we have discussed the spiritual meaning this phenomena evoked in us.
During these nights it looks like the moonlight path on the water is coming directly toward us and it is not even ten feet on either side of us. Yet if I was in Duluth and Wendy up the shore in Grand Marais, we would still both see the moonlight path only shining directly on each of us alone. This is how it too often is with the people of various religions, or of no religion, each one believing that the Divine Light or the truth of revelation has come only to them and could not possibly be shining on someone of a different faith tradition or ideology. Ego says, I have the true light and they do not.
But if we follow the moonbeam path to its source, we see only the moon. So perhaps the lesson is not to focus on the moonbeam coming to to us but to let it guide us to the moon, the source. Perhaps the greater lesson is to remember that the scriptures, the masters, religions are not the Source and to use them to find out what they all are pointing to. We will find out that they are all pointing to the same Source.
On Wendy’s birthday, we spent the night in a condo on Lake Pepin to have a good view of the full moon rising over the lake. But the sky was overcast, the wind was strong and it rained. We could not see the moon, or even its glow, but we knew it was there. So is the day moon, invisible during the our daytime, but always in relationship with us on the earth whether we see it or not.
A few years ago, cabin four burned down and it was not rebuilt. Wendy and I were both very sad, even though we hadn’t stayed there for awhile. Even though we loved cabin four and grieved its loss, I though of the haiku written by seventeenth century Japanese poet and samurai Mizuta Masahide:
the barn's burnt down
now
I can see the moon