spirituality Archives - Page 4 of 4

February 2, 2017

Picking blackberries: Tasting real life

Imagine tooling down a canyon road in an old convertible with friends, a trunk full of berry baskets and toe-tapping songs on the radio. The cool mountain air tousles your hair, the sun warms your limbs and thoughts of ripe blackberries tantalize your tongue. Your only challenging thought is how to resist eating more berries than you drop in your basket.

Life is like picking blackberries. It can be hot and thorny work. But the fruits of a day well lived are truly sweet as you put head to pillow, or the freshest of blackberry cobbler with ice cream to mouth.

Big small talk

I’ve only been blackberry picking once. The old convertible was a cherry 1960 Studebaker Lark. I went with friends from a tiny Sierra Nevada town in Northern California. We picked and nibbled and dropped and talked about life. A friend’s mother shared about being a college student in the ‘60s—the incredible music, the allure of rebellious freedom, the pressure of Vietnam.

We talked about our plans. Her daughter was interested in grad school at Cambridge. Her son seemed to prefer the solitude of berry picking beyond the group, off the beaten path where the fruit is undisturbed and more plentiful.

The daughter’s friend had just quit her job as the personal assistant to a well-known, workaholic attorney who once helped expose a president who’d lied about tangling with an intern. I could tell she was loving the simple pleasures of sun, berries and good conversation—and the slow pace.

Real life

I found myself enjoying picking blackberries and listening as we learned more about one another. Standing there perfecting the art of berry picking (a gentle tug and twist), I looked at my stained fingers, tasted the sweet tinny taste of berry blood and smiled.

This was a taste of real life. It was an awakening after months of talking with friends about Dallas’ sports teams, watching The Office reruns, mowing my lawn and walking my dog and going to pool parties—all while settling for small talk instead of going deep to share who I really am.

I realized that anything that distracts from connecting with others—movie watching or small talk or any number of self-protective activities—lessens the likelihood of my inviting others to peer into my soul. Anything less is burning time—and opportunities to know and to be known.

I’m not saying that time spent enjoying the company of friends and family isn’t worthwhile. The laughter, the teasing, the shared interests and such are all good things, but if that’s all that happens between people, it’s not nearly enough. Not for me, anyway.

Be like the berry

Take a lesson from the sweet blackberries. Don’t live protectively, hidden and safe behind thorny barriers. If you do, you’ll grow tart and later shrivel into a hardened husk. By protecting yourself from the bruising forces of life, you’ll miss the joy of being selected and enjoyed and appreciated. And, most tragically, you’ll deprive others of the sweetness of your soul.

If this article encourages you, please comment below. I love feedback.

January 31, 2017

Looking for paradise? Just imagine.

I pity those who have no interest in imagining worlds beyond our own. Who think hobbits and dwarves and wizards and magical forests and castles and kingdoms and princesses and courage and adventure and quests and elves and beauty are for nerds and misfits.

imagining

As wonderful as our world is—with its waterfalls and mountains and trees and caterpillars and caves and interesting people and cities and seas and reefs, there is something missing. Something magical the world once had, but has lost. This lost magic is what I long for.

Whispered secrets

If I were to wander into an ancient glade with sunlight trickling through leaves to warm a spot of clover upon to lie, I would listen to wind caresses in boughs and trilling leaves. If I could do this while breathing deeply of wood and earth, I might slumber and dream of whispered secrets of what was lost.

imagining — Narnia Woods, near the The Kilns, C.S. Lewis home, uber doofus 2004

It’s as if our world, having surrendered to imperfection, endures as a pale reflection of its creation. It became dark and wild and fierce, and paradise fled. The reflection is discernible, but the magic is found only through imagination. That is, until the end when the world is reborn and made young again, and the magic returns and abides forever.

If this article encourages you, please comment below. I love feedback.

January 13, 2017

Tripping over Time: Why it’s inscrutable

time

I’m utterly fascinated by time. Specifically, its passage and how difficult, no, impossible, it is to comprehend. I think about time a lot. Time is a simple, linear, straightforward concept that trips me up every time.

Are you comfortable with it? Try this: stare at an atomic clock for three minutes. You’ll see that there’s nothing out of the ordinary about the tick-tock passage of time. But think about getting through the first week of a new job or waiting in a doctor’s office or for the first day of school. Time slows WAY down.

C.S. Lewis on time:

“The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”

Lewis wrote of our inability to grasp time in his Reflections on the Psalms: “We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. ‘How he’s grown!’ we exclaim, ‘How time flies!’ as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.”

We struggle to grasp time passage because we weren’t created for it. It’s linear and limited; we’re fashioned for forever. We’re trapped in its constraints just as we’re trapped in our fragile bodies.

We know that time passes at the same rate regardless of how we spend it. But IT NEVER STOPS. We’ve all heard the expression, “Time marches on.” What a sobering thought. Sometimes it seems as if you can slow time to a wonderfully comfortable pace while at the beach at 10 a.m. on a weekday with only a few lifeguards, some hopeful seagulls, the bubbling surf and a good book.

It’s about perspective

I arrived at Navy boot camp on a balmy Florida night around midnight. They processed us, formed us into companies, assigned us “racks” (Navy-speak for bunks), had us fill out tons of paperwork and then finally, two hours later, led us to a sleepy barracks.

I climbed into my rack thinking how incredibly long the day had seemed. Up at 5 a.m., waiting in the processing station, then at the airport, flying to Orlando, riding a shuttle to boot camp … you’d think with all the activity it would have flown by. Not so. Everything was new. And I’d just been baptized in the Navy way—“hurry up and wait.”

I fell asleep and what seemed like five minutes later some crazy man was banging a trash can, calling us names and yelling for us to get up. I blearily looked at my watch—4 a.m.—only two hours after I’d lain down. Two hours had felt like five minutes.

See what I mean? It was like the clock slowed and then sped up. Like in the movies when they make the hands spin.

Ever catch yourself trying to slow a wonderful moment? At that special, “timeless,” instant, you realize how much you’re enjoying life and how quickly the moment morphs into a memory. Oops—there it goes. Better take pictures.

Spaghetti monster

I worked at an advertising agency with a guy who was a bit of a Bohemian. I’ll call him John. John grew up as a hippie with hippie parents; he wore the same clothes to work each day and claimed that God is a spaghetti monster in the sky. And he made fun of people who think God is not a spaghetti monster in the sky.

John was for legalizing marijuana (and drugs in general) polygamy and other illegal activities. He was for whatever people want to do “as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.” He lived for the day. No rules. No worries.

I’m not saying John’s philosophy is ALL wrong. I think he’s half right. There’s something incredibly freeing about taking each day as it comes and living in the moment. But when one lives in the moment with little thought for others or for the future, does he truly live a life worth living?

Carpe diem

Another guy, I’ll call him Harry, loved to get John to talk about God as the spaghetti monster in the sky. I think Harry longed to live like a Bohemian, but didn’t have the guts. He was more like George Costanza. He lived vicariously through John (but only when it was safe to do so).

What do John and Harry have to do with anything? This: Seizing each day and living in the moment is the way to go, but, it seems to me, only if it’s a lived with forever in mind. It took me a long time to get this. But I think, in the end, everyone does. Even the atheists.

If you trip over time, too, and/or enjoy this article, please let me know. I want to hear from you.