26 November

The Infinite Expectation Of The Dawn. See You Tonight

by Jon Katz
Reawaken

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.”

– Henry David Thoreau

So the spiritual path, then, is this for me. Leave your life behind, fall into a dark and deep place, from which you will never emerge, or if you are fortunate, will awaken, reconnect with the natural world, with the mystical experience, and will encounter magical helpers, teachers and guides,  human and animal, that will enable you to begin to learn, to give rebirth to life, to reawaken you to  hope, to the infinite expectation of the dawn. It is there every morning to be found if you can look for it.

The price of this is that much of what you know and are will break away and be gone and you will forever be set apart from much of the world around you,  beyond argument and debate, awakening to a different and very personal idea of  body, soul, self, truth and  life. A spiritual journey, I see, is never completed. It just begins again and again in different ways. There is no final destination, no resting place of peace and revelation. The more you see, the more you need to see. The more you learn, the more there is to learn. You will never get there. You are never better than anyone else. The goal is not the perfect life, but a meaningful life, lived in truth and love and creativity.  Rebirth and awakening are continuous, and a spiritual life is not a life without fear, pain or sorrow, but a life in which fear, pain and sorrow are experienced in a different way.

There is no escaping life. You can die in bed at age 100 or die in a Wal-Mart parking lot shopping for waffle irons. We are all going to the same place. We can make life a struggle story or we can live it, as our animals do.  I am learning that I cannot dwell in the past or the future, only the present. Today is good, today is very good. When people tell me their bad news, their economic woes, their longing for the past, their finger-wagging about the young, their stories of  friends and family who are sick or gone, I remind myself not to tell those stories, and I think to myself that this is life, isn’t it? Life is good, life is glorious, life is mysterious, life is beautiful.

And the reward is this. There are glorious, profound and transcendent moments of beauty and peace and love and creation that are beyond imagination. That’s the pot of gold. Awakening every day to hope and the infinite expectation of the dawn.

___

As I mentioned last week, I am observing my own Sunday Sabbath, my own day of rest, withdrawing from technology, cell phones, blogging, e-mail, texts, Ipads, Iphones, computers,  from sunrise to dusk.  It was very good for me, very important for me.  A day of quiet,  meditation, reading, walking and rebirth. Of talking the dogs, brushing the donkeys, talking to Maria, taking photos.  See you this evening.

26 November

Making Sense Of The World. Five. My Own News

by Jon Katz
Making Sense: The Chicken Walk

 

Every morning Maria and the chickens take a walk to the barn. When  see it, it is another story in my news, and the world makes sense to me. If you don’t want to hurt people in malls to save a few dollars on a waffle iron, and their news makes no sense to you, then look for your own stories in a world filled with magnificent things, everywhere you look.

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