Four Thoughts
Memory and consciousness
I was writing to a friend, Slim, from the Continental Divide Trail. We walked, often together, from the Mexican border to Silver City. I'd shared my tedious tome of the walk through the San Juans, and he paid me the compliment of saying that he relived his own memories by reading mine.
Thank Goodness!
You might read something almost entirely new to you. But if it entirely alien, it won't be grasped by tendrils of your being. And it did you then no good.
If those tendrils, however, reach and touch it, this new thing...then what a gift: you are on the verge of incorporating a new aspect of your being. For the written word must be mirror as well as object. Only then is there communication. Only then is there relationship.
And it is only by relationship that we learn.
I am a stupid man. I do not learn from books, though I've often said I did. And I am always reading.
But in reality, I cower from the world. I read long enough to feel shame. And then I finally go into the world.
I absorb a tiny bit of it. Then I dart, like a squirrel, back into a private place. Only then can I begin to worry the morsel held in my cheeks.
Then, my reading is not such an error. For because I have added to my being, there are more tendrils within it to reach and touch those alien concepts I previously skipped across, ungrippable in my essence. I now have more "handles," and am usefully waylaid.
I'm not yet saying anything new. However, I see something else. If you write your own experiences, then these themselves are represented outside of you. And in so becoming, they are potentially alien (recognition may be swift, "oh, I wrote that, I remember that," but nonetheless, there is a quick sniff first to see if it is alien), and thereby useful.
To grow we must be pierced. And we can aid in our own puncturing with the creation of artifacts that are both deeply known (because ours) but potentially alien (because now "outside," now "objective").
And here was my new thought (never new, only newly discovered): time itself becomes capacious in this (holy?) work of recording and then re-membering. Because walking your own paths now objectified, now "alienized," your being is stirred in the times of the walk itself.
And such stirring, at depth, escapes time...for What Was becomes What Is. And your being now turns his head to the right on the path, where before he turned it left at the shadow of a wing across the sun.
And he shall see what he missed.
And now time is only our friend. Only perceived as the gift which it is when given us yesterday and tomorrow by our Father. We may emerge above it as the delighted child before the Death Star Playset at Christmastime, through which he has already wandered long in dream.
I was looking through pictures from the San Juans and happened to notice, deep in the image of a vast mountainside preceeded by tilting plain, two tiny pixels of color.
They were my friends! And that moment brought the time of that morning again to life. I found them again only by zooming in, and seeing them for (what it felt to be) the first time. Thereby was my depressing story of time-as-arrow nullified for me. And the death in me was diminished. And the life in me rejoiced.
If it is so with only a photo, then how much more so in the careful build-up of image through the written word? For the plodding of eyes across rows of letters blooms real wildflowers in a real meadow singing even now in the loving gift of your imagination.
Recording your walk is the beginning of your journey of discovery. It is the harvesting. The movements, the sweat and joys do stand on their own, yes. But why leave the field unharvested?
I shared this to Summitpost.
Why I like to smoke cigars
On the surface: because it extends my patience with looking out at the land. Then I can see the goodness of a tree. How, from nothing it came and grew. How well it used the gift of sunlight and soil! How individual it became! How its flowering offered new surfaces on which smaller lifeforms could take a foothold here. In the grand ruin of its demise, it sheds its parts. The goodness with which it goes quietly into nights and snows...
Because it extends my patience with the unfolding of thought. When a friend sits with me and smokes, I rejoice in the quiet unfolding of his thought. I forget the world and remember brotherhood, which is far older.
Going deeper, because the activity echoes my experience in prayer. There, I proceed with parts good and my own parts, mostly error. The smoke has a part that smells bad -- it is ash. These are the parts of me already dead when first made visible. But the essence of the smoke is not that part. One just catches it. It is a memory of home, and homes to be. That is the part I would keep and tend.
In the world of spirit we proceed by a sense more like smell than sight. There is the "whiff" of goodness...feeling it, we may "puff" all the harder, with the side effect of enlarging our "ash." In surveying this sad differential, our humility can grow, unwillingly because we are stubborn. I must be patient with myself. It is not for me to consume the goodness that emerges from me. Does the tree withhold his bark in which birds make a home, only for himself?
He would not grow if he did. His growth would collapse on itself if he tried. Perhaps this happens...
I get lost wandering the ways of a deep forest. But that is the nature of a cigar. A journey within stillness.
My inadequecy in the face of what is needed
My biggest error on the Continental Divide Trail was a lack of faith. I wanted the trail to be a meditation on God. But how quickly I forgot the Stillness from which the impetus for action emerged.
I stopped enlarging Him and sought to enlarge myself. As night follows day, I faced the inadequecy of "that one." I forgot how to answer "why am I here? Why am I doing this?"
The world gave me answers, just as Jobs friends counselled him. Think of the Monument of your success! Grind it out! The friends of Job gave him all these reasons for doing what was expected of him by the world. Reasons that "sounded true" to the world of that time. Wisely, he failed to be convinced. He was unsatisfied by everything except relationship with his God. Today, the world doesn't expect us to love God. It expects you to "live your truth." Everything is individualized. We are supposed to live in tiny boxes where yes, I can have "my truth" in there with me. Above all, don't be a bigot. Don't claim to have found Truth. Claim instead that you found your truth. Keep your eyes down, don't make any judgments about anything you see in the world, and you'll receive treats. And this world has its own kind of answer for dissatisfaction. It'll be "you do you." In the context of the trail, it was "hike your own hike."
What I lost was relationship. And any expression of that relationship, even in rebuke, as God offered Job, would heal me such that the dissatisfaction before became, in hindsight, only a joyful chance to renew the central relationship.
But anyway...I failed to think of all of this. So I tried to "grind it out." Further error came from that attempt. Unable to remember the proper answer to the questions, I ran out of gas.
Had each step been taken looking into His eyes, there would have been Sufficiency. For each step taken is then centered in the heart.
I am glad I stopped! I'm a fool, but not continually foolish.
The one behind it all
And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. --Matthew 26:26
I never understood the beauty in the Eucharist.
It is a bringing down of the highest imperative to the lowest level where we live: to follow Him.
If the Kingdom of God is within, then it is out of the stuff we are made that it will be realized.
If the body is an expression of the souls need for experience, then it is holy.
If the body needs food, then let that food be of the highest nature possible.
If He comes to this world of bodies, and offers what He is as that food, then He is the loving God for doing so.
In prayer, when I use my true, inward voice, and say His name, I am fed in the listening for answer.
But prayer must be lived to mean anything. And our lives are in bodies. By holding consonance between the thought that imbibes Him, and the acting out of it, our life may yet become prayer.
Only then does the boat round the last buoy. The boat cannot prematurely leave the course. To imbibe Him in thought without action is to be dualistic...to continue unconscious motion, unconscious eating, while too-soon feeling "as if" one has actually taken a real step.
So...where there is eucharist, there is a chance at Right Living.
One might still error! In fact, probably I had to go a long way 'round to see this because I couldn't understand the thought behind the action of eucharist. And rather than being patient enough to discover (by listening) the right thought, I set out on my own.
I've had to investigate reasons myself. But now I understand better. There are many error ahead of me! But now I can define terms:
Holiness is action that aligns with the Highest. Picking up a stick and moving it to the side of the road is more holy than leaving it there, because it allows persons to travel easily on their way, that they may more quickly reach the goal (which is He)
Remaining silent rather than boasting (a hard one for me) is more holy, because it obscures the small voice within each member of the party.
To think of Him even as I eat...to shut the mind to all possibilities other than the truth that this food is He, is to embark on a life lived entirely infused with Him.
Anyway...that is where I end up.
All errors are my own. All truth comes from Above.
When will I come to the end of my talking?