We had a rainstorm last night. A good rainstorm is just what I need to remind me that life is not supposed to be perfect. Life is whole.

I have a dry creek bed in my back yard, to hold and channel the runoff when it rains hard. It begins on a hill and slopes down into my yard. Otherwise, the runoff from the street, as I am in the lowest plain, carries everything into my backyard and makes a mess.

Every now and then, a heavy rainstorm shows me who’s the boss. I woke up this morning to see my small river rocks, or pebbles, spread throughout my yard as if it was a rock painting in the grass. I could never create such a lovely design as nature had so easily. It was wondrous, if it wasn’t that I knew I had to go out there and spend the day restoring order.

We try so hard to keep life neat and ordered, with everything interlocking in symmetrical and sequential patterns. Our day should follow our plan, just the way we write it in our day-timer. Our relationships should be as easy as the self-help experts say they can. Our professional life should unfold like those of all our friends who seem to have their act together. 

But, life is whole, not ordered, and, certainly, never neat. Wholeness contains all possibilities, all opposites, all options within the circle of itself. Days run smoothly then blow themselves out into chaotic free-for-alls. Relationships look neat and tidy to the neighbors; they never are. And, our professional life? What sacrifice was made if they assemble like directions in a cookbook?

I walked the neighborhood this morning. There’s a tree across the street around the corner. The local electric company was out with chain saws and workers on lifts, replacing downed wires and restoring power. I passed the duck pond and stopped to watch the ducks. Three baby ducks were playing in the puddles – one more reminder of nature’s cycles and what wholeness brings. Life is always ready to come back ‘round again and offer what wasn’t, just moments before.

Joseph Campbell came to believe that the soul of life is not about meaning, but about aliveness. We participate in life’s aliveness. That’s why we’re here on earth, to participate in the wonder of it — the ups and the downs, the beginnings and the endings that never really end, the cycles that bring drought and then rain storms and baby ducks. The more alive we are, the more open we are to what wholeness and the life-death-life cycle of which we are a part offer us in terms of humanness, the more meaning we create from that aliveness. The gift is that we just are.

I love those small river rocks that form my dry creek bed. They force me to pick them up and play with them after virulent rainstorms and place them back in ordered patterns, different somehow than how they were just days before. I don’t know what order, or what place in line they liked the best. I can only put them back as the moment predicts, as instinct dictates and imagination leads me. I know they’ll only rearrange themselves and spread out across my lawn once more.

Is this not the way of life? Don’t I daily pick up the pieces of my life that have been scattered across my field of becoming? Don’t I lead with my imagination and my soul to place them exactly where I think they need to rest? And doesn’t life, one more time, scatter my plans and safety and should-be preferences into some other lovely design I would never orchestrate myself? What else is left but to say, “Yes, yes, once again, yes.” I want the aliveness. I’ll have to accept the chaos.

Wholeness is everywhere, offering every opportunity for us to see beyond the momentary setback or confusion to the work of sacred energy active in our life. The circle cycles back around to embrace our surprise that life is always larger than we can contemplate, that what happens before us is participating in something larger than we can even dream of. That frightful rainstorms and baby ducks and even death are in the service of our becoming our freest selves.

The day wasn’t wasted. I’ve played in my back yard under nature’s canopy and participated in the aliveness I want so dearly to embrace in me. And, even with the hours I’ve spent creating order in my yard where once again I know chaos will break loose, I love the wisdom of it. It’s only when I delude myself into thinking I’ve created an order that will last that I leave myself open to being reminded in even more devastating ways.

Wholeness has an order all its own. I’d better learn to love it and laugh with it and participate in it as it fashions even me into what it dreams I can be.