It has occurred to me in thinking of yesterday's blog and response that one can have one's wine and drink it too.  If we are to believe the Scriptures, Jesus well knew that his life would end young on a cross.  Even if we think this is religious myth, he must have known something bad would happen after turning over the tables of the merchants in the temple.  And yet he danced and drank, perhaps with abandon, at the Wedding of Canna, where he turned water into wine.  Yes, although the cross awaits us all, for that is the story of Jesus, we can embrace the life we are given with joy.  If we are free, that is; free from our limited perspectives. If only we can let it go, all the bad, the anxieties, we might see the underlying beauty in everything.  Without that, we have a fool's paradise; with it, we might have the paradise that has been given for this life.

I would argue that to have this perspective, however, takes discipline and/or grace, that which the masters have so often spoken of.  And so out of the sack cloth of spiritual search, we can get our magic, our Santa Claus.  

Finishing Rawling's beautiful book, "Sojourners," I came across another of many beautiful passages, this on the thoughts of the protagonist, Ase: "He wondered if he could explain his sense of timelessness. He did not think of it as another life, nor yet quite an immortality of the same one.  It was only, he felt, that individual lives could no more be separated from life itself than drops of water from the mass of ocean.  He was willing to give to life the name of "God," since men knew no other larger enough with which to speak of the ineffable, the Word made Life.  He supposed men were not fit or ready to be entrusted, desperately as they needed it, with the secret of the Word.  No, he could not explain."  

Could it be written better?  Ase is a simple Jesus, an ignorant farmer who yet knows.  Troubles and deaths come to him as is does to us all, yet he is able to see the wonder, the timelessness beyond it all.  To him, it is all somehow perfect, a mosaic of "God" that we cannot, are not ready to understand.  

But Ase is fictional.  He is what we should be, but are not, but can be.  Yes, like him most cannot yet know, but we can be open to wonder as the child, and forgetting of the trials to come as Jesus was when the skies opened up over Mt Tabor.  We can live on the sunny side, not in an eternal Mardi Gras, but in the simple grace of awe that we have been given if we remember; if we can get past what we have been made, by the social and by our own biological impulses, we can remember.  These, our chains, are all captured in time, and in that resides misery.  But somehow, in the ineffability of inner knowledge, we also live beyond it, all of us, everything.  We can rejoice if we allow ourselves to see, to mourn in time when we must, and then leave our mourning in the timeless. Free, free at last.  

Happy Thanksgiving, FK
          


   

To Cal's comment on "Anxiety" from yesterday's blog: Heck, you can write what you want!  It's fine to be on the "sunny side," which is often the case with my own disposition.  I have no corner on ultimate truth - rather, I write with the authority of those I have read, often using their opinions as my own for a better exposition. For instance, Singh, author of the book on dying that was written of a few months ago, insists that we all go through a catastrophic trauma at or near death, where we lose everything, even hope, before we come to rest in a greater sense of self and meaning. No one of human make, as far as her experience goes, escapes this descent into hell.  Thomas Merton in some respects goes even further: even one's pieties are fake.  We are separate from the Ground of Being and must suffer the consequences of anxiety, fear, social conformity and disillusion.  Without God, we are incomplete and ultimately unhappy.  As the Bible says, "man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards."

But there is that pesky Zen axiom again: better not to start; if started, better to finish.  Why is it better not to start the path to knowledge?  Because, as Merton knows, it is one that is nearly impossible to complete.  As such, it is better to live in a fool's paradise - the sunny side - than to fret and worry over our loss of real paradise, often with no other consequences but more worry. 

I already began long ago as many have, and cannot stop.  This is because, like growing children, we have discovered that Santa Claus, the fool's paradise, is just that, a make-believe.  It was nice to believe in Santa.  I remember the magic well.  But once the truth is discovered, we can't ignore it.  Santa - and our fragile belief in self and reality - is a child's myth.  On the other hand, it is a far better myth than that of the philosophical anarchists, who see nothing but meaningless blackness.  Better to have Santa; if that darkness is as far as you can go; better to have the fool's paradise.

There is more, however, a lot more.  For one, some of us enjoy, or at least are compelled, to climb the magic mountain.  Like a material mountain, it is difficult and dangerous to climb, but we'd rather be there than safely in our beds at home.  It, this seeking, comes from the heart of the explorer.  It is in us all, I believe, but perhaps more strongly in some than others.  We do not climb the mountain because it is there, but because it tests something within ourselves, ultimately cutting away the debris that clutters our thoughts and lives.  Climbing a mountain is approaching the real.  It leaves us with frost-bitten toes, but we have found something that needed, that demanded to be found.  

In the case of the spiritual mountain, we find that same "real" that, once glimpsed, cannot be pushed away for long.  We find that we are a part of a bigger scheme, a part of eternity that goes far beyond piety and axioms.  It moves us to the bones.  And it moves us to faith, one that may someday take us through the Dark Night and deliver us into heaven.

Or not.  We all find ourselves in the same bed on our dying day. Maybe it is best to simply whistle past the graveyard and let the dead bury the dead.  Who can look at a man on a frozen cliff, pitons slipping, and envy him?  Stay home and be warm and well-fed!  Or not, again.  We are all called to ultimate fear and loss in that death bed, but few of us can squirm past it, regardless of our past interests.  Go march with Louie on the sunny side of the street if that is your preference.  It probably will bring you to the same end.  But I cannot.  The wild winds howl and the starry sky calls, and if that, too, is a fool's errand, then that, too, is no worse than a lifetime at the Mardi Gras.  FK                    

Yesterday it rained all day, unusual in Wisconsin, and it was hard enough and cold enough that we gave up our daily walk.  By dark, which is now 4:30 with a cloudy sky, I was feeling the anxiety, the antsiness of confinement long known as cabin fever. That's November for you.  SAD approaches, again, to hopefully be broken by the incoming snow this afternoon and tomorrow's glittering brightness.

This morning while cooking an omelette, I heard an add on the radio for anxiety.  It promised a bright and sunny disposition without prescription and without negative side-effects.  The add is right on cue for SAD and I suppose they'll make their money, but I know: it ain't gonna work.  There are lots of things that temporarily elevate mood, but they are all temporary and some have very negative side-effects.  You can't run and hide from anxiety.  

Vos Savant, the highest IQ woman in the world who also writes for Parade Magazine, had her entire Sunday column on hypnosis and getting rid of unpleasant memories.  Yes, she said, some can do this, but the changes to the brain from events are chemical in nature and cannot be whisked away.  The changes and the unhappiness or anxiety they cause continue, only the conscious mind no longer knows why.  There are lots of caveats to this equation: sometimes, for instance, physiological changes cause the subconscious to produce images that mock real-life events.  We might even believe that they are real, but they have been produced from some biological abnormality.  For me, if I have too much alcohol, I get nasty anxiety dreams.  I suppose it is a Godsend, as it keeps me more moderate, but I do not feel the gratitude at 3 in the morning.  Regardless, she is right in that we cannot sweep our problems away with a magic wand.

However, the pivotal point seems to me to be how we view events, not so much the events themselves.  In the hexagram "Keeping Still," the I Ching states: "If the movement of the spinal nerves is brought to a standstill, the ego, with its restlessness, disappears as it were.  When a man has thus become calm, he may turn to the  outside world.  He no longer sees in it the struggle and tumult of individual beings, and therefore he has that true peace of mind which is needed for understanding the great laws of the universe and for acting in harmony with them."  In the Gospels, Jesus tells us, "not one moment more of life is brought to a man through his worries." (my paraphrase)  The upshot for both is that we have to still the ego to still anxiety.  For the East, this is done through meditation; for the West, through contemplation (much the same thing) and/or faith.  What was the Serenity Prayer?  Give me the wisdom to change the things I can and live with the things I can't and the wisdom to know the difference, or something similar.  

Easy to say - we must see how calm we are when awaiting a major surgery or cancer treatment.  The test, then, is strong, as strong as the world and our bodies and minds.  Which is the way it is supposed to be and must be.  If true calmness or faith were to be had from a simple prayer or magical trick, it would be like pestering Dad for a new bicycle for Christmas.  We would not ever be compelled to rise above a dimension of being that is seriously near-sighted.  We are gnawed by anxiety and fear to compel us out of our flat, limited reality, for nothing is harder than keeping the mind still.  And yet nothing is more motivating than extreme fear or pain.  

When it is said by the religious that we are never given more than we can handle, I have to scoff.  People fall all the time, and sometimes they never get up. Few of us can handle the worst that can be given us in this life, as we are, but that is where the wisdom lies, where the axiom speaks truth.  We must either be silenced by the most extreme discipline of meditation, or really, truly have the faith to silence our worries for us. Yes, life is a test, and like the November gray, we can't make the bad stuff go away no matter our money or power.  The seasons and our fortunes and health change.  We must, one way or another, learn to ride above them or suffer the torments of our panicked selves.  It is the way it is, and we have been given the ways out - but as long as the sun shines, few of us ever take them.  Thus the rich man is a camel passing through the eye of the needle.  Thus every well-fed, healthy and happy person is a rich man.  Thus, we are given the most we can handle and then some, that which we can only handle with the help of the sacred, of the god within Self, or of the god who sacrifices for us rather than the one we sacrifice too.  

It is, in the end, an all or nothing game, this life.  We are compelled sooner or later by the utmost extremes to see the folly of our own power in its frightful grasp.  Simple but pure faith or hard-won asceticism, either way, we can alter the chemical changes to our brain, override that which we are told cannot be overridden.  We have been given both the the need and the ways to rise above the practical mind, even that of the most intelligent woman in the world.   FK   
               

We stepped out of the car today into the wind, the dog eager to have her daily walk at The Farm, a 320 acre former farm that was bought by the county and is now a park  The grass for cows has been killed off here and replaced with prairie grass and flowers, and now the chest-high stalks glisten in the weak sun, their pale yellow shining against the crust of early snow.  It has been very cold with high winds of late, but today was well into the 20's, and with the sun I barely had to zip up my winter coat.  We walked over the first hill and down, only to see another walker coming the other way, with dogs.  Aye, no, now we had to leash our own and hold her against her pretend lunges, something she would never do off leash, but those are the rules.  The other walker, however, stood still, and soon we knew why: she was our neighbor and was waiting for us, to walk back and up the longer steep hill past the woods, where the view of the frozen lake and the farms beyond was best.   


Soon we were talking, and retirement and the fortunes of others came up.  Our "neighborhood" is a 2 mile stretch of road, and by chance, most of us living along it are of roughly the same age, ranging from the mid-fifties to the late sixties, and work life for most is being rolled up.  Two couples already have plans for months to spend down south, avoiding the sharp cold that is Wisconsin winter, and others, only semi-retired, are planning shorter trips here and there, as children no longer are going to school and money is no longer so tight.  For a few, money is not tight at all, and we discussed this, too, with the longing that comes from casual envy.  Everything in our speech was casual, but that is not really so.  Retirement is a strange thing, and it hits in ways many would not expect.  


I know I did not.  Layoffs have recently come to our house, and once we ordered our finances so that we could hope for continued independence, something odd happened, at least to me: a black hole opened up, not to infinity, but to an end that might be 20 or more years into the future.  Yes, that would be death, but that is not what makes the hole ominous: it is rather the realization that something must be done with those remaining years; that to simply coast on the grain in the barn is not enough. More grain must be raised, even if the field is gone.  How, then, to do that?  What, then, to do to feel fulfilled?


It's an odd thing that I had heard of from others, but I thought it impossible.  Coast!  While I was living with the Indians of the Amazon, it seemed to me that none had this ambition - that to have enough meat and fish and sweet potatoes was enough, and that if it were given, they would simply get fat and lie about in their hammocks.  Maybe I am wrong - maybe they would feel an emptiness, but I would never see this situation.  That they did not have our ambitions, though, is unmistakable.  None were going to be stars or famous because they had no mechanisms for being famous.  Even warfare was largely a thing of the past.  To be a good hunter or farmer, yes, but that was the limit of what they could be


We, though, have no limits.  There is always someone better, either artistically, financially, morally, or whatever.  Every peak to us reveals another peak, and the desire to be the best can never be satisfied.  But it is not just a desire to be the best - I believe I gave up that notion long ago - but also, or rather, to be useful.  In retirement, even though it is your own money that you will be living on, there is sense of not being useful anymore.  Without usefulness, even with a full bank account, one feels useless.  A general feeling of happiness becomes difficult.  This is why so often the big lottery winners end miserably.  Having money is not an end to itself - it is only a resource.  It is a pile of fish or meat that will not rot. One has plenty to eat, but no thrill of the hunt, no challenge, no difficulties to overcome.  It is the plight of the over-rich and the retired and it is real. 


A few years ago, we saw a PBS movie on John Muir.  He came to America from Scotland with his father when he was a young teen and they settled on the new lands in Wisconsin that had recently been taken from the Indians.  His father was pure Calvinism: work, work, work!  One was to be useful and industrious!  It was his idea of God's desire for us and he infused it into his reluctant son, who would rather walk the woods and fish with the more layed-back locals.  He went to college and became an industrial engineer and was very successful, his father's voice always in his head - work, work, be useful! - until he was nearly blinded while attempting to fix a factory machine.  In the movie, at least, this was his turning point.  He quit after his recovery to do the things he was to become famous for: travel through the woods and mountains and plains of 19th century America with no more than his cloths and a small bundle of cooking items.  His accounts are incredible: he walked the Sierra Nevadas in California with this nothing of gear, caught in blizzards and storms, not complaining of his suffering, but relishing his freedom in the elements.  He was something of a miracle, so merged with nature that he seemed indestructible.  His life was no longer to be useful, but to explore, to feel, to live the wonders of nature that had been set before him.  This, he felt, was the natural man, not his father's worker bee.


He did go on to write and become famous, and maybe that was his goal all along, although we are never told this and it does not seem likely.  Regardless, this was his philosophy, as it probably was the Indians' in their own way: explore, wonder, enjoy, tremble, feel.  Anything past sustenance was excess; all the rest was there, made for our discovery. 


They are conflicting cultures of thought, these, and they make all the difference in the world if we have the privilege to decide between the two.  Must we have a project, a goal, or is living enough?  Must we try to save the poor or build a bigger barn, or can we simply enjoy the sunset?  Which of these is the better goal?  Most of my neighbors would say,"have a goal," for we are united as a culture behind this.  But that is culture.  What of that beyond culture?  What of the moral imperative of life?  And is there a moral imperative to life?  


This is the hole we look into at this age.  Some brush past it, thinking they know the answer, but the answer is far more difficult, really.  It is a question of meaning in our life, not just to ourselves and to others, for that is ever-changing and often superficial, but to fate: to God or to soul or whatever we might call it.  Does this empty hole turn dark because we feel we must be useful, or does it turn dark because we are not doing what we should be doing?  And what might that be?  Is God more impressed with our doings, or with us being impressed by God?  
It seems almost the latter, but I am not quite sure, not yet. Everyone, it seems, comes to a different conclusion at this stage, and perhaps it is simply up to individual fate and preference.  Maybe it should be an easy decision after all.


But probably not. Life is not some casual gift.  If not to be useful, then, to be what?  Maybe the answer was once easy, but we are a culture of change and excitement.  The wisdom of elders is rarely appreciated, for their wisdom knows little of new technology and the latest fads.  Maybe,.then, we should roam what we can of the mountains like Muir, and take them into our hearts and deeper still.  Maybe, even if it must be done without appreciation, we should live for the appreciation of life itself, however we might define that.  Perhaps in defining this, we find our usefulness after all.  Perhaps that has been the point all along, to fully appreciate, our useful business throughout life not our real business.
  
It seems it all comes down to finding Self.  Who would think that retirement could force us to confront this, the hardest work of all?  FK
                        

I know, yesterday's blog was one of those reaching for the stars through the stutterings of logic and analogy.  It might sound that I think I know what I'm talking about, but "thinking" would be the wrong term to describe it.  I sense it, and probably less so than an everyday illiterate tribal member from another time and place, who instead of logic used mythology, the stuff of all religions. That is the way the world has chosen to speak beyond itself since the beginning of language and measured thought, and for good reason.  

Metaphor is the only bridge to a greater world that we have linguistically, and it was best used by the holy people of old, but now many no longer listen.  If not invested from the start, the stuff sounds like gibberish, contradictions and fairy tales, and the authority of ecclesiastics becomes caustic.  Instead, we have turned to art, to interpret for ourselves what truth the author or artist might have to convey.  Still, we must be open to that truth, or it will pass us by as another tidbit of prettiness or foggy thinking, just like the mythologies of old seem so silly or opaque to us now.  But it is there; not everywhere, but in anything that I would judge to be true art.  I found it in a popular movie recently, "Interstellar," and I am finding it again and again in M. Rawlings novel, "Sojourners" :

"And after he had known all possible of this earth, he longed to know still others, to walk like a god the starry sky.  The sky itself could scarcely satisfy, it was infinity for which he yearned, to be absorbed in it, never again lonely, the cosmos filtering through his conscious being, and he in turn returning to the cosmos his own awareness."  

This from a book published in 1953, long before LSD and the big Eastern guru movement and the New Age; this, the character, an unschooled prototype, a 19th century farmer, the salt of the earth. From him we learn to look at nature for its beauty and its secrets, and to social life for the marvel of our own being, born as we are for certain expressions of the infinite.  Here we learn what we are missing in our anxieties, in our worries and desires and ambitions.  Here we learn that life itself is enough, as are each of us to the other, if we just let it in, if we just gave up our tortured self-centeredness and opened to what was both within and without us.  Love, beauty, and as the seed within them, truth.

Once we see it in one movie and one book, we begin to see it in many more.  These are our new mythologies, but they are telling us the same thing: that life is a mystery that is guided, that is vested with us and for us, although we can never fully understand.  They are telling us that the wonder of it all is more than enough, and we as humans in living it become more than enough ourselves: whole, good, beautiful in our own right.  They are also telling us that we are NOT what we should be.  There is guilt in this, or danger and transgression, or however the culture or author wishes to express it, but it is our tale - that we COULD be enough but are not.  They show us that it is all of ours, this tale, of how we got to this dark point, and how we can reclaim our true nature, both ours and all that is around us.  

I would say that this, this message at large, is in all good works, by definition.  There are many more such works out there than we often guess, the message hidden as it must be, for little is truly learned from pedantic lecturing, which cannot pinpoint the message anyway.  It cannot be put in practical words; it simply must be coded.  And just as we find it in more and more works the more we look, so we find it in our own lives, in the view out the window, in a visit to the dentist.  Life is our metaphor, speaking as it does of something greater - of our walking like gods among the stars, of our conscious being filtering through the stars where we, in turn, give back with our own awareness.  

Marjorie Rawlings, you got it right.  From somewhere in the solitude of the soul, you found what we all find there, and it was good.  FK  
        

There is a Jehovah's Witness who comes to my door regularly, usually on Saturday morning when I am cooking a late brunch.  His visits, unannounced, are an annoyance to me, but the conversations with him are usually filled with information.  For instance, he and his son are big deer hunters, and one season he came to my door with a grave expression: the deer, he said, have unusually white coats, which meant a very big snow winter  ahead.  As it turned out, we had the most snow that year ever recorded since records had been kept in the state.

He also was a steel worker, and sometime in middle age fell from three stories up and broke his  back.  That was the end to his career and the beginning of his medical problems.  For the last several years, he has been in several times for heart surgery, but his first time was the worst.  He claims he went into a black pit of nothingness, even though he expected a light or some proof of a higher world.  This turned him to the Witnesses, who proclaim a heaven on Earth to come rather than one in a celestial dimension.  Exactly how his rational worked still puzzles me as to specifics, but the affects have changed his life.  He did have a life-changing experience after all.   

My mother is now in a later phase of senile dementia, perhaps due to Alzheimer's, although that cannot be ascertained with certainty without an autopsy.  In any case, not only is she losing memory and gaining hallucinations that no one else sees, but certain aspects of her personality have undergone deep changes. What she thinks of herself now is not altogether clear, as her changes are often mercurial, but one thing is certain: she is not her old self.  Brain damage due to the disease, or the ravages of old age, have been extensive, and with that, so have the changes been to her self and her entire reality system.  Brain damage, or in the case of the steel worker, anesthesia, has real effects.  Brains are important, not only to the functioning of the body but to the notion of self and the greater grasp of reality.

We often hear stories of the near-death experiencers, of how they meet relatives in a heavenly sphere, of how they experience light and a transcendental love, even as their brains are supposedly clinically "dead," that is, non-functioning.  As our steel worker knows, this does not happen to everyone in dire conditions, but to enough to have caused a low-key national sensation.  This is not new: from the earliest times of my own memory, people have talked of "life flashing before my eyes" when faced with imminent death.  It is not a new fad, this belief in something beyond the brain, even if it does not refer to heaven.  And yet, we know that when brains go wrong, bad things happen to memory, to thought, to the very nature of self.  This is proof, it seems, that at the very least a greater part of our selves is locked in the brain, and that when the brain is damaged or dies, so does this part - or all - of ourselves.    

Mystics see it differently.  As Thomas Merton put it, no imagination, no image, nothing of this world suffices to define God, the hereafter, or any other notion we have put in our brains about Ultimate Reality.   For them, the self is either an illusion - and that is just a word, which hedges in our thoughts - or an ephemeral floss.  The world itself is seen through this floss, and although it is real, we cannot understand it as such.  And so our image of ourselves, of our bodies, of our brains, is this partiality, this limited vision, itself.  To dissect the brain for our true selves, then, is like scrutinizing a Bugs Bunny cartoon to determine the nature of rabbits.  What we see as the brain is partial, unreal, a minor notion of what is the seat of the human being.  It is, rather, the seat of the superficial self, just as the world we experience reveals only our own partial understanding, not he essence of the world itself.  We build from illusion and in the end, only find a more refined illusion.  Bugs Bunny will never, regardless of our industrious efforts, reveal the true rabbit.

It is my own sense that the mystics are right, buttressed as they are by scripture from many different religions, if properly understood.  The enigmatic phrases of the great gurus, or Jesus or Lao Tsu become clearer when we understand our own partial realities.  The strong are weak because they are most invested in our partial reality; the weak are strong because they are less so, and less committed to our group understanding.  And at the bottom of it all is divine Love, which makes of our individual personalities only thin shells, only minor spices in the great cosmic stew.  

What those who go to heaven and come back have really experienced I cannot say.  Perhaps it is an expansion of vision that does not include the ALL, but somewhat more of it, as it is not limited to the laws of the natural world.  I doubt that while there, those who do experience it are "themselves" as they understand it, but are changed.  Most who have these experiences DO come back changed.  As to what happens to the "self" of people who experience severe brain damage so that they can barely think or function,this I do not know.  Are they held in limbo like the steel worker in his anesthetized state?  In a book written by a hospice worker, she states that sometimes people in a coma will "come to" to say clear words of departure to those around them just before death.  Where have they been all that time before?  Where, for that matter, are we when in deep sleep, beyond even our dreams?  

Yet we do not disappear there, just as I suspect we do not disappear in coma or in death.  Rather, there, the brain and the systems of life as we understand them become irrelevant.  It is not speculation - many throughout time have told us of the world of reality beyond our visions.  But we cannot help but continue to look at the brain, or the heart as the Greeks had it, to see the human.  It is all we think we know, and it is the reason why the path to Truth is so difficult.  It, all we know, must be left behind to understand.  In a way, the brain, our seat of knowledge, is the greatest obstacle of all.  Perhaps as long as we are tethered to it, its very existence proclaims our limitations.  

But we live on.  The study of the brain will reveal some really interesting data, but it will not reveal ourselves.  It might be that our true "brain" is the cosmic pulse of the universe itself, that the stars speak to us as they do because they are us, separate but together in a never-ending infinitude, dancing to the pulse that the wise say is joy, is love.  But don't expect to find that on the dissecting table.  FK                

At last, back to my computer!  Oh, the things we covet!

And the things we don't; yesterday, like a bad penny turned up, was "visit to the dentist's day," which, now that we have insurance, comes every 6 months.  Each time I step out after the cleaning, feeling like a fetid alligator whose teeth have just been picked by daring birds, they ask if I would like to make an appointment for another visit in six months.  Each time they do that, I imagine the season, next time to be in May, when the best instead of the worst weather is before us, and my head spins - it will be here just as I am here now, another season, another 6 months closer to that time that ends all time.  

But that is too hard to grasp; rather, and more to the point, I dislike dental visits, even as they undoubtedly save my teeth and save me from constant, often sharp pain.  When young, dental visits were always filled with pain; now they rarely are, and the dislike comes from the feelings of the helpless idiot, lying there while machines whir and steel points pick around dental tissue and questionable nooks and crannies. There is anticipation of pain, and there is the mouth open and the dripping slobber and the suction - nothing at all like a romp through the fields on a fine day. 

And yet, things happen at the dentist, always.  I hear of lives of dentist and hygienist, of faintly hidden disappointments and fears, of the people themselves who lean over my tea-stained teeth. There also might come, as did yesterday, oddly sublime moments that resonate in the quivering overhead fluorescent cylinders.  The cleaning machine whirred on, but behind it came the voice and guitar of Bono and band over the ubiquitous speakers, and in that odd light and noise came the sensation of an otherwordly bliss, and with that the humor behind finding this bliss, undrugged, in the hated dentist chair.  And in that humor came a memory from the parking lot.

20 or so minutes before, stepping out into the frigid clime before the dental office, I noticed a half-dozen cars parked over to the side.  Imitating Sherlock Holmes as I often try to do, I quickly deduced that these cars were the properties of those who worked there, leaving the closer spots open for the paying customers.  In noticing them, my Sherlock mode continued as I read a vanity plate from one of the cars: Jelly Bean.  Of course, said Sherlock, candy is the stereotypical source of tooth decay, the bread and butter of the dentist.  Yes, of course this was a car of someone in the business.

Then the machine stopped, U-2 was replaced by more pop, and the scum and suds was sucked from my mouth.  Yes, I could now talk and thought I must show my brilliance by asking about the license plate.  "I saw the Jelly Bean plate out there and knew it had to belong to one of you," I grinned, probably dripping with slobber.

"Yes, " she said, "that one's mine."

I figured it had to be one of you, what with candy and cavities and all."

"Well, no, really.  It was a nickname my father called me." She was noticeably tired that day and now she got wistful. "His Jelly Bean."

What to read from that?  What sadness or nostalgia or disappointments or lost love?  And how right and wrong my Sherlock was.  Yes, it had been the car of a dental worker, and by luck or whatever, I had made the one in six long-shot by getting the owner.  But its meaning was read entirely wrong - except maybe that the nickname presaged her profession, but that cannot be determined.  Rather, it seems, I had stumbled onto the truth through faulty reasoning, chance bearing me to a certain point that led deeper than I had imagined.  

That is how it often is, then: we think we know, we are led down a certain path by that knowledge, and then we discover that the path leads to something beyond our thoughts, to something deeper, darker, more profound.  This, it seems, is our way to knowledge.  Like the scientist who yells "Eureka!" while taking his bath, we putter about in an attempt to understand and are then taken by surprise when the true understanding, once beyond our ideas, comes.  It is the spice of life and perhaps the heart of our lives, this stumbling and discovery, this bolt from the blue - this seeking and, in the end, this guidance.  

And so we are meant to seek, and from that, the meaning often comes, not as a deduction, but as a gift, as if an answer to a prayer.  Could it be that all along we seek the answer to our lives, the ultimate answer, in death?  Is this our own determined path, our "Sherlock" moment written in life?  And won't the answer to come, begged for in our seeking, be beyond any thought that we might have? 

But I have gone too far, I know; it is enough to know that grace may touch us in the dentist's chair, and that knowledge may come as a breeze, as a whisper from another place, unknowingly called for by our seeking as well as by our hidden doubt.  Always a doubt, for we all know that Sherlock is just an imaginary character after all, and that there is an author that stands behind him, himself more nuanced than any character we could possibly grasp by deduction alone.  FK            

My apologies to regular  readers - my computer is sick and being treated for viruses at the local electronic doctor's - such being a topic in itself, but today, another  topic and a short one (as this is a borrowed computer and is driving me nuts) from the new book I am reading, "Sojourners"  by Marjorie Rawlings.  

Best known for her novel, "The Yearling," which was made into a movie years back with, I think, Gary Cooper, " Sojourners" is one of the finest examples of descriptive  writing I have ever read.  Her mystical love of nature pours through the pages as true and sincere as the most ardent  worshiper in a shrine.  As I have found with my own novels, such descriptive work affects the rhythm and  thus flow of the book, making for a difficult airplane read ,but oh, so beautiful!  Meanwhile, her story runs through the  mind of a simple and nearly saintly man surrounded by our normal profanities, including a mother who hates him and a brother who he loves, but who has  left the 19th century farm in Upstate New York for adventure - and to leave the clinging mother who only loves him.  Thus our simple saint is burdened with the cross of a spiteful mother whose comments on him are so nasty as to take your breath away.

Perhaps one of he most interesting study in the book is on the obsession of hatred.  The mother was married to a man who became spiteful after his own family cheated him, his spite leading him to rape the mother, causing her to bear her faithful saintly son.  We understand the initial feelings, but we are lost as to its persistence.  Why, we have to ask, is this woman living in hatred decades  after the event, well after her despicable husband has died? And why for a lifetime  must she hate the son who was born from this event, even as he has proved himself better than  most humans who have  ever walked the earth?  

Rawlings leads us to understand that it is a product of extreme egotism, of clinging to hate as a way to give one a center of infernal glory that appears to be immortal.  And as other flawed people come into the picture, we  begin to see that it is not just Amelia, the mother, who  suffers from this destructive narcissism, but much of the coming age of modern industrialism which is slowly  eroding the old farming way of life.  With little mention of religion, she paints a  picture in our hero of what life could be - of loving and sharing amid both hard work and beauty - and what most of us have made of it, a mystical cast of beauty that we have reduced by our own ambitions and personal slights to the flat, meaningless gray that often confronts us, that makes us fear sickness and disease and the death of the body and the ego.                

All so pointless, we see; amidst the wonder and bounty of America, all such a waste.  I for one read on, brought to solemn wonder by her descriptions of spring flowers or wintry sky, and am brought to regret over my own squandering of what I have, and to a hopeful resolution that I might  be as open to sky and grace as our hero.  I know this will not be - I am too complex and egotistic a man - but I see the possibilities; more than in the character sketches, I see how blinded I can be to the wonder of life in my own little  shell; and how limited and clutching this  little shell is.   I, many of us, do not hate like mother Amelia, but we often repel the good in much the same way, with a  regard only to our precious and fragile view of self.  

Rawlings brings a sermon to us without the overlay of guilt and the platitudes of the pulpit.  Rather, she brings it  too us through  beauty, and the guilt we find is only of our own recognition.  I read her book and think it should be enough to make us all perfect, but of course it is not.  The road most of us have is rough and long, lost as we are in our self-determined and often destructive  ignorance.  We are, then, sojourners, aliens in our own land where nothing abides.  But also, if we wish, we are also pilgrims, who at last might see a glimpse of our greater selves in the  reflection of the  budding  willows or the wispy blue sky.  FK 

In the crush of the "polar vortex" and unremitting gray skies, we went to see the movie "Interstellar " last night, a nearly 3 hour pictorial bonanza of space and worm holes and inter-dimensional travel.  But it begins deceptively, in a dust-bowl like plain that takes us back to 1930's Oklahoma, leaving us there until an overflying drone is captured by our hero - who we learn was a former NASA pilot- by his laptop computer.  Ah, now we know - we are in a world of the future where resources have been exhausted and the planet is dying, strains of rust destroying all man-made crops except corn.  

But we might also think at the beginning that it is a ghost tale. Our hero has an unusually bright 10 year old daughter who is talking to ghosts in her room, apparently receiving messages from them in code.   After the drone incident, where we know our place in history, she figures out that the code is binary for location coordinates.  That night, she and her father hunt down the coordinates, which lead to an old NORAD site that apparently has been abandoned.  They quickly find that it has not been abandoned, but taken over secretly by NASA to find a way to transport humans to another world, because they know, unlike the regular populace, that it is doomed.  They have hopes to do this because a worm hole has been opened up near Saturn by an unknown intelligence that permits them to travel to another galaxy where Earth -class planets might be found.  What they have not figured out yet is how to use gravity as a power source to lift the millions still alive to this new planet.  

It is a long and involved movie and I would have to spend many more paragraphs to sketch it out.  What we find, however, is that the unknown intelligences are humans in the distant future who have mastered the fifth dimension, where time might be treated as space.  The key to gravity is to be found in a black hole, into which our hero enters, only to emerge in the bedroom of his 10 year old daughter (who is 40 in our world), where he desperately tries to tell her the secret to gravity.  It turns out, then, that it was the father of the future who was the "ghost" sending her messages in the present.  Eventually, the 40 year old  daughter picks up the watch that the father had given her before he left, and she discovers that he is sending her the needed information in code through the ticking of the watch.  Humanity is saved and father and daughter have an unusual reunion at the end that stretches across decades.  

But the essence of the movie is in the watch, or what it stands for, and in gravity.  The watch is the father's love, which is characteristically portrayed in maudlin Hollywood style (we must not lose sight of it, though) and gravity is the attractor - of planets, of people - in fact, it is the outside world's reflection of love.  Like love, it can transcend time and space, just as the love of father and daughter did.  And like love, it is the answer to our problems.

Although I should not say "like" because love and gravity are different expressions of the same thing.  As a female astronaut hero says (my paraphrase) "it might be that our emotions, that love, is a reflection of a greater reality that we do not understand."  So, while the movie offers a lot to sci-fi lovers and relativity and quantum mechanic fans, it's essential message is this: what we are is a reflection of universal principles, the greatest of those being the attraction towards each other and all things - love -  which reflects the basic unity of the cosmos that stretches beyond time and space.

Who would have thought a sci-fi thriller would be a spiritual exercise? (albeit somewhat hidden.  Not one reviewer seems to have picked up on it.  But then again, so it is hidden in our lives.) Then again, it is a movie that strives for greatness and sometimes (but certainly not always) achieves it.  To do that, to arrive at greatness, one has to reflect on great things, and nothing is greater than the human spirit and the force that inspires and transcends it.  FK  

When I was a kid, my parents had an expression, the "life of the party," which referred to certain people who were "musts" if one were to have a memorable fun event.  These people usually drank too much without getting obnoxious, played piano, told jokes, and otherwise entertained and smoothed the social situation so that others could loosen up and have a good time, too.  

In professional situations there are those "must" people as well - they are focused, get discussions going, excite new ideas and generally fill the room with positive energy.  

So it should come as no surprise that there are spiritual "musts" as well, people who bring the sense of another, greater world into one's midst and make the whole pilgrimage of life seem worthwhile.  But in the spiritual realm, many say that something else is going on; many say,for instance, that those few avatars of tremendous spiritual depths not only transmit a holy presence to others, but actually keep the world functioning, even existing, in a very literal sense.

The first time I had read of this was in the Theosophy magazine, where Madame Blavatsky was quoted as saying just this about a group of avatars that had contacted her from their seclusion in the distant Himalaya Mountains.  She claimed her contact was psychic, which one would expect, and enigmatically postal as well.  

It all seems so unreal as to be laughable, but many others have said the same thing of the spiritually connected - that they alone keep the world in existence.  In the latest book considered in this blog, Merton himself said the same thing: that there were perhaps two perfected souls alive at any one time in the world, and it was they who allowed the continuation of our world.

How this is so has never been adequately explained to me. Merton makes the Christian argument - that it is the healing power of the Mystical Christ that unites the alienated masses with the power and purpose of God.  In this, we can begin to see a bit of the logic, for if each moment of existence is an act of God, then there must be some conduit between creator and creation that is pure and open to reception.  

Still, I for one am dissatisfied with this explanation. Why must God need this conduit?  And aren't we all connected anyway, even if our small "selves" don't realize it?  And what about the rest of creation, the more reactive or inactive members of being?  
Perhaps we must find the explanation in the concept of "will."  If we, as I wrote yesterday, have willed our separate conscious from creation, perhaps we could will ourselves into oblivion, as this separate will only believes that it is the creator.  Could we "will" a bicycle into being without recognizing the act of the bicycle maker?  Could we deny outright the existence of the bicycle maker and so sit around wishing, wishing for a wish that would never come?  

So, I think, the idea of the "Mystical Christ" (or avatar) becomes clearer.  It (he or she) is not only the conduit to creator, but the energy source that keeps us from sinking entirely into our self-made little human world.  In one sense, the affect might be very practical and understandable, for this connection, working through the imaginary world of humans, gives us a glimpse of hope in a meaning far greater than our existential pattern of "life, work and death;" it keeps us in touch with a greater meaning that just might keep us from destroying ourselves on an individual or planetary level.  On a more removed spiritual level, this slim connection might keep our collective dream from sinking of its own detached and shallow weight into the nothingness that it almost is, just as waking life and consciousness is needed for the production of dreams in sleep.  

Those few avatars, or that one Mystical Christ, then, might literally be the "life of the party," the spirit that keeps the whole shebang from slipping into such a morass that everybody just goes home.  They might be our collective connection to the real body, that which sustains this partial reality, this dream of God's dream.  We might, as the wise men have often said, actually be of one body, and this or these spiritual masters might be all that keep us alive, connecting us to the living breath of creation - often called the "living waters" - just as our bodies keep us alive so that we can have phantom bodies in dreams.  

I would never have guessed at this or imagined it by myself, but so I have read again and again from heads much wiser than my own.  And so, even in our clumsy attempts to get at real Truth, maybe there is a bit of the saving touch, for these attempts, too, must aid in some way the ones who singlehandedly keep the party going.  Even the life of the party needs someone to appreciate the energy and sing along.  FK