If you follow this blog you might have noticed that I came down with a bad case of blog slog this summer. How to do another post and not be repetitive gets harder the further you go on. So I took a break. Maybe enlarged and clarified my horizons. Or so I hope.
I have realized that if I am to get to one hundred posts, which has been my goal, I need to talk about what I am working out at the moment, not just repeat things I have already learned. And, because I like my narrative broken up by images, l am still including pics.
Perhaps part of my blog block is that lately I have been leaning more to contemplation than to the busy-mindedness that blog writing brings. But while I find meditation and contemplation helpful, I have a suspicion that I may never qualify as a true contemplative. When I have stumbled upon mystical states, I have felt them to be a gift, something from outside calling to something inside for reasons I do not know, but which I rejoice in. It is they that gave me my taste for Spirit.
God or life or whatever has also graced me (well, so it seems to me at least,) with just enough talent and education to write narratives that celebrate God's creation, For me it has been life enhancing. The mystical inspires the artist in me who needs to express gratitude and delight and something forever open ended.
C.S. Lewis once said that a controllable God is no God at all. There are many forms of psychology, philosophy and spirituality, including some understandings of Christianity, that put God in what is hoped to be a God-shaped box. But, of course, there is no God-shaped box.
God or Spirit or whatever, is first of all...Wild? Free? Different? And always Unpredicatable, something that comes and goes like the wind. If there are hard and fast spiritual rules then we can control spirit.
Having just shed some stress in the mountains (do trees absorb stress as if it were carbon dioxide?) I feel how important it is to keep my conception of God wild. Not brutal wild, which is a consequence of the fall, but awesome wild.
Our original wholeness was not brutal wild but Edenic. Our final wholeness will not be brutal wild but where the lamb and lion lay down together neath the shade of fruitful trees. No wonder we need wilderness, And see, there is a gardening reference here after all, one which I doubt I need spell out.
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And so I believe the mind is good for more than just chatter, that reason is a fine servant that helps us discern things--like why wilderness is so important.
But it is not by reason alone that we work out dilemmas. Just a bit ago I was on the reference desk with a patron who spoke a little Polish. Did you know the Polish word for yes is 'tak'? --Well, now you do. As do I. Hmmm, tak pronounced talk as in talking, writing, communicating, saying yes to life. Yes, I think that works. Yes, I think I will be able to get this blog to 100 posts now. And I do not think it will even be that difficult. Yes.
(For a sense of scale on this last pic. notice the human in the bottom right quadrant.)
