East Shore Friends,
This mid-January bleak day, the snow is falling, and the roads are covered. The ability and willingness to travel wanes. But that doesn’t mean a soul’s journey is waylaid, on the contrary…
“The search for truth is not a matter of being found at the end of a road. It is a matter of experience and transformation. It’s in living, and working through the processes of thought, that we come to understand something of the truth of ourselves and the world.” (From Michel Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure)
The search for truth, the journey towards understanding compels my head and heart, especially as I try to reconcile the messages of Hope, Faith and Love that I learn from the Sacred – against the greed in the bushes, snakes in the dark, the dogs that bark – in late stage capitalism, in the media, and the pain expressed and experiences by so many.
A poet’s words leads me toward something like ‘reconcile.’ The words of Rilke come to mind (from letters to a young poet), “I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Living my questions – reminds me that bushes need tending to – spring and summer trims and pruning. Snakes need heat, connection and ecosystems of care as ancient symbols of healing. The darkness is the only chance we get to see the night sky, ever clearer in the winter. Dogs that bark are communicating danger or challenge.
We can love the questions asked of us. We can hope that the drives in each of us are also the drives in our neighbors. And, each of us can hold onto the faith that despite differences, we share more alikeness with these neighbors than the manifested divisions might offer. Love is that tie that binds us together. Love is the cord that leads us through the journey and our search for truth.
I am glad to have each of you on this journey together, as we live our questions. The Work is unrelenting, but each of us, and the network of love that surrounds us, the mutuality that unfolds beyond offers a solace.
Peace and Love upon you, and all of us, let it fall upon all of the Earth,
Rev Will