Month: October 2016

There is a great storm coming.   It will be like nothing I have ever seen.  So far I have seen practice events, yet they are only a warm-up for what has yet to come.   It is interesting to me.   I am curious about how it will unfold and I am hopeful about the outcome.   I might as well take it all in, because the gears are in motion, and the storm will come.

We have already changed the balance of the atmosphere and a resulting change has begun.   It is good and respectful that we try to change the thoughtless things we have done to cause this change.   But the coat-hanger approach to releasing energy from inside the earth continues to change our world even while we slowly amend our ways.

However, no matter what we do, there will be great human suffering.

I am comforted that there people in my life that are preparing to face the same winds of change.   They give me hope.   I am not in this approaching change alone.  There are those who will be able to bend with the wind and yield to its power and force.    We will be carried along into a new future if we do not resist.

I will help them prepare to welcome the wind with awe, and they will help me.

Some people have reacted to my un-coupling as though they had just witnessed a train-wreck.  I have to reassure them that it is not so odd, we had simply completed our task.   In many ways, we all could have seen it coming as a normal consequence of events.   Nothing that surprising.    In some ways it was predictable, and we might now anticipate it with the vision of hindsight.

I once said, “We will be together for a long time.”  And we were together for a long time.   We worked together as a couple to raise two boys into young manhood, to create a thriving garden, to expand and beautify a house.   But there came a time when there was no longer a light in my partner’s eyes when I looked into her face, when she began to avert her gaze.

When did that light disappear?   I think it was so many years ago.   We  went through the motions of a couple, often with joy and enthusiasm.   But we no longer exchanged the glances of lovers, as we set our eyes to the tasks at hand.

I now can see a flicker of that open expression of connection in the eyes of people I encounter on the bus.   These are the people who do not avert their eyes when I look into them.    There came a time when my partner could not bear to see me as I actually was, when I no longer reflected her sense of herself, when I was no longer as she imagined I should be.   Then she averted her eyes.   We had become co-workers, connected only to the task.   And sometimes I didn’t even measure up to that.

So am I involved in a train-wreck?   Perhaps that is what normally happens when you put two lovers on the steel path of a contracted relationship.   It is easy then to predict where this train is going.   Eventually the task of working as a couple runs out of steam.

For me, un-coupling is not really a train wreck, but an acknowledgement that the work is done.

It has begun.  It is a new day.   It is a day with all the promise of uniqueness.   I hear the sound of a bird chirping.  A dog barks.    A car passes by.   None of this will ever be repeated again.   None of this will be exactly the same.    And so it will be all during this new day.

The mystery for me is that all these things are happening in the eternal now.   And had I not had my window open just a little, would they have occurred in my world at all?

I want to live in a mystical, magical world where nothing is as it seems.  As I look around, I think that is just about where I actually am.    So I might as well get comfortable with it.

For me, that is the life of a contemplative.   I don’t mean to be someone who is withdrawn, living apart from the world, lost in their own imagination.    For a long time, that seemed to be what contemplation was about.   Being lost in the space between one’s two ears.

Now I think a contemplative is deeply engaged with the world and engages it with vigor, awareness, and intimacy.   This is not the frenzy of running about in the world.    It is walking thru the forest with special glasses on that allow me to see the trees as they really are.   It means I have to first cleanse my mind of all preconceptions of what treeness is.    It’s forgetting what I’ve learned a White Pine is and seeing, touching, smelling this tree.    My imagination and memory are put aside.   My mind and heart are open, alert and engaged with this tree.

This is how I find my mystical, magical tree.   This is how it exists in my mystical, magical world.