Guest Post by Dennis Ernst
The sky is just beginning to warm above the eastern mountains. Wisps of clouds catch the first colors of the sunrise, painted against a deep blue-black expanse of night sky. I walk in silence, breathing the rich desert air, absorbed in the fullness of the moment.
There was a time when I would sing HU — an ancient word for God or spirit, sometimes called a love song to the divine. This is a way to connect with my inner worlds and my true self. For a deaf man who cannot hear his own voice, trying to sing to yourself is a bit comical. Over time, I worked with something inward, a resonance, that felt more than heard. Eventually, that too fell away. Not lost — outgrown, the way a shell is outgrown.
Across every culture, in every era, human beings have reached for the same unanswerable question: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Science offers the Big Bang — a description of what happened, but silent on the deeper mystery: what caused it, and what existed before. The ancient stories circle the same silence from a different direction. Many describe a primordial wholeness — complete, boundless, containing all possibilities in an unexpressed state, like an infinite ocean, perfectly still. Quantum theory calls this the Field. All the possibilities, every possible state held in potential, before anything is observed or measured into being.
These are different languages for the same wordless thing.
But the old stories add something the equations leave out. They suggest this wholeness began to dream. Not from need, because it lacked nothing. But from the nature of what it was: creative and overflowing with love for what it might bring forth. It dreamed spirit as the medium through which possibility could unfold — the canvas, the light, the breath moving across the vastness of existence. And into that dreaming, it poured two qualities inseparable from itself: creativity and love.
Hindu teachings include the metaphor of Lila, devine play. It signifies that creation is a spontaneous and joyful expression rather than a duty-bound act.
If this is true — even as metaphor — then these are not human inventions. They are the original nature of existence, encoded into everything that has ever been made.
Here is what stops me in my tracks, in the middle of the desert, in the early light:
This is exactly what we do when we create a Now.
The primordial wholeness contained all possibilities, unexpressed. We too carry within us an infinite field of what could be — every choice unmade, every word unspoken, every path not yet taken. Then something moves. Attention gathers. Awareness leans in a particular direction. And out of that vast interior potential, one specific, unrepeatable moment crystallizes into experience.
We don’t just witness the Now. We dream it into being by becoming — just as the old stories say the Creator did.
And here is something the mind resists but experience confirms: the Now is always timeless. The mind ranges freely — backward into memory, forward into anticipation — but notice that every actual experience you have ever had, without exception, happened now. Not then. Not soon. Now.
Even your memory of yesterday is happening now. Even your worry about tomorrow is happening now. Past and future are real as concepts, as navigation tools, as the stories we tell about our lives — but as direct experience, they do not exist. Now is our becoming and all that there ever is. The Now is not a fleeting instant on a timeline. It is the only place experience has ever occurred, and it has no edges.
This is what the ancient stories were describing, without the vocabulary to say it plainly. The Creator’s dream didn’t happen once, long ago. It is happening now — because now is all there is. Every moment of creation is this moment. Every moment of experience is this moment. The dreaming never stopped; it became the world.
Our deeper self — call it Soul, or pure awareness — exists outside the ordinary constraints of space and time. It learns by becoming, by diving fully into experience and just being. And here is what quietly undoes every sense of separation: this awareness is not entirely individual. At the level where it is most itself, consciousness is shared as part of the field. What one soul learns ripples through the whole. The boundaries we feel so certain of — between self and other, between my Now and yours — are real at one level and transparent at another.
We are each a unique point of expression within a single, boundless field of awareness. Separate the way waves are separate — genuinely distinct and made of the same substance.
The predawn light has shifted while I’ve been walking. The eastern horizon is burning now — an orange-yellow glow in a pink and blue sky, layered against the mountain silhouettes. The desert air carries a fragrance of something spicy-sweet, flowers, creosote shrubs, stimulated by the coming warmth of the sun. I stop walking. I am bathed in the luxurious beauty of this moment.
This — all of this — is creativity and love made visible. Not as abstraction. Here, in the particular sunrise moment, this particular Now. This is what those ancient stories were pointing toward: the original creative impulse, still moving, still pouring itself into form. The beauty I am experiencing is not something I observe from a distance. It is my own deeper nature meeting itself in the world — the Creator’s dream, being dreamed through me, right now.
The sun breaks the horizon. First, just a point of light expands, streaming long rays, until the whole desert is aglow, and something in the land seems to simply receive it — to breathe it in deeply.
In this moment, I no longer feel the need to sing HU, or reach toward spirit in any form. The practice has dissolved into the thing itself.
What I am being in this Now and is what I have now become — every experience, every loss, every wonder distilled into this particular awareness standing in the desert light.
There has never been another Now like this. There never will be.
So the question opens outward, and becomes yours:
What are you being in your current Now? And what are you becoming?
We are not separate travelers. We are the dream becoming aware of itself — each of us a unique expression of the same creativity and love that moved at the very beginning, learning by becoming, weaving the possible into the actual, together.
I walk on. The sun warms my back. The morning chill is behind me, and I realize that this Now is complete. It contains exactly what I have become.
And I am the HU — not singing it, not seeking it — simply being it. Spirit in motion. The Dreamer’s dream, dreaming itself awake.
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Dennis Ernst is a retired Professional Land Surveyor who now devotes his time to sharing the natural beauty he finds on his many treks through photography, blogs, and poetry. Please visit his website, Dennis Ernst Photography, for a glimpse into his fascinating world.
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