A recent journal entry
So many days since my beloved left the planet I awake in what I feel is the depression of discombobulation, of having a life with too many moving pieces and too few stationary ones to accomplish much in the way of worldly ambition.
Then I have a cup of Death Wish coffee and write in here.
And while that doesn’t change the deeply free-floating nature of this phase of my life, it’s very helpful in the subtle reorientation of my inner compass so that I appreciate with a touch of renewed clarity the singular focus of “God Alone or Suffer” that is my life’s mantra, and always has been, only in recent time the universe has upped the juice, the stakes, the demand.
This is the real old-age comfort: the gun-to-the-head process of stripping me of so many entrenched preferences. Such preferences, all preferences really, while soothing to the ego, are potential distractions to being fanatically positive, the price we must pay to know our own soul.
So well stayed with such clarity. “Stripped of so many of our entrenched preferences” really describes getting older. I am blessed with an innate positivity, accepting that fact, but finding new ones until I return to the divine.
Burning karma = purification by fire = the airplane route to healing. There will be some turbulence but The Pilot knows how to get us through.
Free-floating is RIGHT! I think there is something in the cosmos enhancing this feeling but I also think it is part of being willing to let go of the entrenched preferences and find an entirely new way of interacting with life. Michael Singer says, in Untethered Soul, (I’m paraphrasing) that the psyche gets created so the ego can filter life through its model of reality in order to not be overwhelmed by the constant input of life through the senses. I totally get this at a visceral level and think I experience the free float in that gap between the former and the latter, until I actually learn to let life move through me without resistance, without something triggering me and taking me off on a tangent away from the present moment. He says life itself is the highest spiritual practice…….and so much more that has landed the way things do when a book presents itself at the perfect time. I am about to start it again for the fifth time. I read it daily and it never fails to bring me to center, and more quickly every time. Thanks for sharing, Steve.
Reminds me of the wise words of the Indigo Girls:
“Well, darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable
And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear”