subcutaneous

In my life in recent years, I feel like I've been asked to view everything from two dimensions. There is the obvious that is what is going on and there is the unseen for which the obvious is a metaphor. There is always more than meets the eye represented in every moment, and no doubt, I dream things up that aren’t there sometimes. But I’ve always seen events and scenarios as metaphors for a large, unfathomable truth, rather than a simultaneous spiritual event.
After a while, I realize that the obvious is not really a metaphor, but that it is directly connected to the spiritual that it allows us to see. The top of a rock sticking up out of the ground is not a metaphor for the bottom of the rock under the surface. It is all the same rock. The tree is not a metaphor for its root system. But I see the top of the rock and I know there is more beneath the surface. I see the tree and know that there is a root system beneath, by which it is nourished and made to stand.
In my current state, I am a spiritual being in a body, living in physical creation. I think I am seeing events less as a physical representation of a larger spiritual reality and I’m beginning to realize that here in creation, the observable also has a spiritual component. It is a part of the same reality.
I remember a lecture by Thad Barnum, in which he proposed that John’s account of the search in “all of heaven and all of earth and under the earth” throughout time, found in Revelation 5, was his being allowed to witness, from the vantage of heaven, what he’d already witnessed physically at Jesus’ crucifixion, perhaps 50 years earlier. That proposition is one of the most fascinating that I’ve ever dealt with. It is the popular belief among those who believe, that the revelation all a foretelling of what is to come. But eternity, evidently doesn’t know a future, but exists at once, like a location that can be searched.
I am obliged to wonder right now, what is going on beyond my vision. What reality is speaking thoughts and questions in to my head that I must deal with. In this quiet moment serenaded by frogs and cicadas, what flurry of spiritual activity is taking place in the root system?