Abundant Life

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San Ysidro creek starts somewhere high in the Inez mountains above Santa Barbara, California, and it falls through a boulder-strewn stream bed down to the bay and the Pacific Ocean. It is a dream of a creek, bubbling, dancing, pouring; sun-dappled and butterfly-haunted, laced with blossoms and grasses for which I have no name. In February, which is when I know it, it is in spate, swift with the melted mountain snows.

The first time I saw this creek, my immediate thought was, “They must turn this off at night, when no one is looking at it.” Realizing how silly that was, I still had to wrestle a bit to wrap my mind around the idea that this pouring forth was continuous; that the stream flows all the time, splashing over the rocks and into the tiny pools constantly, whether I was watching it or not. And it struck me that the creek, in its careless fullness, in its unceasing abundance, is a kind of model for the ceaseless creative energy of the universe, which is also pouring out and over us all the time, whether we see it or not. So I go back to the creek every year to remember; to remind myself that we stand always in the flow, that the waters of life are washing over us in a springtime torrent every day we live.

Which is not to say that scarcity is not a reality as well. It can be easy to lose track of the simple abundances of life if we are hungry, or unsheltered, or in want of something as simple as mittens in the raw Minnesota winter. Abundance has this dimension—that it is responsive to need.

There is a Sufi teaching story that explores the nature of abundance. It tells of a seeker who was meditating in the forest and observed a bear with a mangled foreleg. Unable to run or to hunt, the bear seemed destined to die of starvation, yet as the seeker watched, a fox came with its prey of that day, and after eating its fill, it left the remainder of the meal for the bear. Several days the seeker observed this same pattern, saying to himself, “Behold, how good and generous is God, who feeds the bear by means of the fox, how He provides for all His creatures! I, too, will put my trust in Him utterly.” And the seeker retired to a cave, to await the arrival of his provision, but days passed and nothing came. Finally, on the fifth day, as he was fainting from hunger, a voice said to him, “O thou who art in the path of error, repent! Stop imitating the injured bear, and go out and follow the example of the fox!”

We can understand the abundance of the universe in two ways: as an invitation to complacency, or as an invitation to generosity. Much depends upon that choice. For if we respond with complacency—if we merely accept all the creative energy and all the love and sacrifice that have made our own lives possible, then the abundance of the universe comes to a stop in us. If we choose to receive what we have concluded is our due—and even, perhaps, to complain that it is not given exactly as we would have preferred it—then we make ourselves something outside the process, something other than the ever-flowing stream of life, something transitory and futile and ultimately trivial. It is when we respond to the abundance of life with gratitude and generosity that we become a part of that universal creativity. When we contribute our own energy to the flowing stream then it fills us and pours out of us to others, so that the stream is enhanced.