Words are increasingly difficult to find. I stare at this blank screen unable to articulate what continues to unfold here. Perhaps they will come. In most cases, they don’t, or I delete the ones that do. If they do, you’ll be reading this 🙂
I can attest, yet again, that if you persist in this journey, it will take you to strange places (all within yourself, of course).
It is very difficult – most days, impossible – to care even a little about what is happening in the world. The drama and its many characters are increasingly seen for what they are.
Trump! Biden!
What is a Trump? What is a Biden?
No, seriously, what ARE they, really? THAT is the question. All else is mental labeling, labels upon labels upon labels, judgment after judgment after judgment.
Who is reading this post? Who is the one writing?
These are the only questions worth asking, the only real purpose for this phenomenon we call life.
Sound defeatist? Maybe depressed? How about nihilistic? Pick your label, I’ve heard them all from the earnest who insist I return to the drama, roll up my sleeves and care.
What is recognized here is that each and every day that I remain disengaged from what we humans have come to call ‘the real world,’ the more that the ‘unseen’ world reappears.
Each day, sometimes multiple times in a day, I walk a lonely stretch of power lines with the dog. I say lonely because it’s rare to come across another human out there. The service road that I walk is flanked by an impossible array of wild grasses and flowers. The road beneath my feet is similarly festooned with all manner of stone and rock.
Prior to this journey I’d never have noticed such things, hellbent as I was on getting things done. Even when I was on a hike, the quest always was to find that perfect spot, that most glorious of vistas, the place I could pull out the camera and ‘capture’ the moment.
Now? A lonely wildflower peeking up from the hard patch of road is cause for a long pause, a smile, a recognition of this shared journey.
Sounds so utterly woo-woo, doesn’t it? I’m ok with that. Particularly when compared to that so-called real world out there.
Increasingly, I see what the sages have long taught: that it’s all here, within me and without, all of it. With you, too, you and I being one and the same thing. ALL of it is one and the same thing.
The pesky mind creates all this separation and division, sows the seeds of suspicion and the need for superiority, gives rise to the endless judgments. This is good, this is bad, etc., etc., endlessly. Ugh. And yawn.
It all just is and I am not separate from it despite what the mind says. I was ‘born’ of it and will ‘die’ back into it and nothing will have happened at all.
I see, too, that I don’t have to experience ‘enlightenment’ to begin to see these things, to enjoy their lessons, their truths that liberate me from the craziness that has always haunted the human world.
It is more or less impossible for others to understand this. I wouldn’t have for most of my life and even now, I see things I completely missed six months ago and no doubt will see things in six months that elude me now. That’s how it’s been these many years – two steps forward, one back, and none of the ‘growth’ measurable by the standards of the mind.
The recipe for this journey is wonderfully simple. In fact, there’s really just one ingredient: a quest for truth beyond all else.
