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| Everglades National Park, Florida |
I found Infinity in a swamp.
Walking along one of the trails in the Everglades National Park, a sign drew my attention. It was different from the others that I had read: it didn't just describe flora and fauna.
"There is more here than meets the eye". How many people do we meet here on this planet? How many experiences are we doing on this Earth?
Sometimes our relationships are challenging: we really meet rabbits, lubber grasshoppers, snakes, alligators, shy birds... Most of the time we think we meet these animals outside, but the truth is that we can encounter them even within us.
Every human being is sort of an animal. But there is an Italian word that is "anima" and it means "soul". Isn't it interesting? Anima is contained in the animal.
In every human being there is more than meets the eye. There is the soul.
The soul is fearless, far from being a rabbit. It is not clumsy, far from being a lubber. It doesn't need any poison to defend itself, like a snake does. It is neither aggressive like an alligator nor shy like a little bird, because it is beyond the environment that make those animal behave like that.
Our mind is perfectly able to make us behave like animals though.
"Stop for a minute, listen quietly, look carefully". Who wrote this sign, Patanjali?
I stopped for a minute, I listened quietly, I looked carefully. I found my breath, the synchrony with each sound of the environment around me, the vibrations resonating beyond shapes and colors. My soul, ultimately: infinite, eternal, free.
Do we really need to be anima-ls? The answer might be surprising as much as finding an anonymous sign like this in a World Heritage site: yes, we do.
What we can do is becoming aware of that "mental animal", recognizing it and taming it so that it becomes a friend and not just our mask anymore.
We can walk that path to understand who we really are, to let the anima inside the animal shine and show us the right directions.
I want to follow that light, full of gratitude and surprise in front of myself and any other human being, because "life here is abundant, but not always obvious".
