I think a spiritual path inevitably leads to a sense of isolation and disconnection, something I’ve often read about in the lives of people I admire – Thomas Merton, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Campbell, Thoreau,  Wendell Berry,  St. Augustine, Aquinas. Many people are not lucky enough to get the time or opportunity to consider their lives carefully. They are too busy surviving.

Most people are not interested in a spiritual life for various reasons. Our culture values work and business, money and entertainment, technology and confrontational politics. We are told that we need many expensive things in order to be connected, healthy and safe. So we pursue them. We grow farther and farther apart from authentic work, from study, from quiet, nature and the animal world. And from psychic and literal health, it seems. We seem to want a culture in which the cheapest price is our common goal, and the individual work lives of countless people are snuffed out by notions of free trade, globalism and the the world market.

Everybody has to make their own choice, but if you pursue a spiritual choice, you may find yourself on the fringes, marginalized, feeling like a joke sometimes and treated like one.  Our culture doesn’t work that way. It needs lawyers, doctors, pills and procedures to work. And lots of new stuff. I think it’s the price, perhaps a fair one. I want a spiritual life, have always wanted one. Everyone has, in the final say, to make their one way, and one way is as good as another.

I’ve read so much and thought so much. I’ve been to Quaker Meetings, Protestant Churches, chanting sessions, analysts, therapists, psychics, spiritual counselors. I am in less pain now then I was, and less fear. Now, as I am growing up and getting older, it is nearing time for me to land somewhere. In recent weeks, I’ve been going to Temple, where it all began. I like it. I weary of shopping, and want to sign up somewhere. Home seems an inviting place to land.  I have had enough seeking, and want to find something. Is it spiritual fatigue? Or is coming home the answer? How ironic. Somes I feel I’ve been wandering around for 40 years myself. Don’t know yet.

There is a huge difference between this time and others. I am not alone in this pursuit of spirituality. Maria shares this passion with me, and we do it together. We go to Churches, Temples, Meditations, Chants. We are getting there and having someone by my side is itself a spiritual experience, in its own way the very place I have most wanted to get.

I have lots of work still to do on myself, work that will continue on to the end of my life, I hope. If I stop, that is the first death. But I am different now, perhaps even more outside of the tent than I was before. That is my natural place, I think.

I love the Ipad 2, as I did the Ipad1. Going back to Kinney Road to work on my next Bedlam Farm Diary, speaking of spiritual places. A Temple for me, that road.