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Spring weather doesn’t usually come to my part of northwestern Wyoming until late May or early June. This year was different.

John Cali

Spring came in early April. In all the years I’ve been here, that’s never happened. April and May are often wintry here in the big valley where I live. Even early June some years.

We got little snow in the valley this past winter. So I figured the coming warmer weather would usher in yet another bone-dry summer, added to our ongoing eight-year drought.

I was wrong.

This past winter I hadn’t paid much attention to the weather reports for the high rugged mountains surrounding our valley. Then a few days ago I picked up our local newspaper, The Cody Enterprise. The weather summary reported the snowpack in the surrounding mountains was at an eight-year high, the highest of this current drought.

This was good news! It meant we would have more water in the valley than we’ve had in many years.

I had taken the narrow perspective, seeing only the dryness in my immediate environment. But if I’d taken the greater perspective, I’d have realized the dryness was not the greater reality. There was an abundance of water about to descend upon us (literally).

I think this a great analogy for the way we often view our lives.

Here’s Chief Joseph.

Chief Joseph

Achieving the greater perspective is the greater challenge for so many of you.

We realize how easy it is to get caught up, if you will, in the nitty gritty daily details of your human lives. There’s nothing wrong with that, for you need to focus on your immediate worldly environment to navigate it successfully.

But what often happens is exactly what John just described -- you begin to believe your immediate environment is the entirety of the world you live in.

Friends, the world you live in is far greater than what you see around you. What you see around you is only a part -- a very small part -- of your greater world, your greater selves.

When you have this narrow focus, as opposed to the greater perspective your higher selves have, you sometimes become fearful, discouraged, even terrified and desperate. "Is this all there is?" you ask so sadly and plaintively.

No, it is not all there is. There is far more to your lives than you can possibly imagine from your current perspective. There is far more to you than you can possibly imagine.

If you can get even a small glimpse of the greater perspective your higher selves have, you will be inundated with incredible joy, joy you have rarely or never known in this lifetime.

That joy, friends, is the joy with which you incarnated. It is the joy you remembered as little children. It is the joy you have forgotten as big adults.

Life is supposed to be fun. Life is supposed to be happy. Life is supposed to be joyful. Life is supposed to feel good! Regardless of your circumstances -- the immediate environment you find yourselves in, and which you find so difficult to see beyond.

Your higher selves -- those guardian angels who are with you eternally -- see beyond. They have the greater perspective. And so too can you.

Simply seek joy in all your human experiences. It is always there, in all your "good" and "bad" experiences. It’s like that vein of gold buried beneath the earth’s surface. It’s there, but you cannot find it unless you look for it. You have to "mine" the gold, the gold of joy.

First, though, you have to accept it is there. Look for the joy, the gold, always and in all ways.

Then you will have come back home to your higher selves, to the greater perspective. The greater perspective is your only perspective.


Chief Joseph talks about similar subjects here:
All Is Well
Appearances
Rainy Days
Seasons of Our Lives
The Cold Chilly Winds of Life

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