It is a lovely rainy day. I have a rare half a day alone, and I’m listening to The Avett Brothers’s The Carpenter and Jack Johnson’s In Between Dreams. I almost always find rainy days lovely. It might be a throwback to my days as a framing carpenter, and the light of hope that would rise in my heart whenever clouds rolled over the worksite… I was a sucker for an unexpected day off. But I suppose it has more to do with the fact that I was born an artist and a hopeless romantic.
I still don’t feel like I have much to write about. I think I am in a season of learning to just let things be what they are. If I feel fear and worry, I just acknowledge it and do the best I can with each moment. If Jude wants to play with me all day, maybe I need to give up my ideas of “productivity” or “accomplishment,” and follow the whims of a toddler’s tiny, boisterously overflowing heart.
Today, I’ve got car troubles, apartment searching, and my family’s future over the next three or four years on my mind. My career path is still uncertain. We’ve got one car with reoccurring issues, and another that’s too small; but I can neither change the past by regretting, nor change the present by clenching my jaw and straining my brain. I just need to let it be what it is. I can’t take pictures of the car for Craigslist because it’s raining? Time to write a little, finish that Phillip Marlowe murder-mystery, and maybe work on the laundry instead. Eventually I will find a way to fix or sell the car – and if not, what’s a silly junker car in the grand scope of one’s life?
This past weekend at a family reunion, I got a chance to sit around a campfire and look out across a forested valley, while the sun set behind the opposite ridge. It was really a majestic sight. Not take-your-breath-away majesty, but the simple, pure, lung-filling kind of reality that makes you stop your busy brain for once and put yourself in perspective.
Moments of sight like that cause me to wonder how anyone can go through life and never feel a part of something much greater than oneself, something greater than science, or any human form of organization or way of life. It is these moments which remind me to just be whoever I am. It’s not always clear, but it is easy – the Beatles were right on that count. What else are you going to be, after all? Even if all we are is broken, frail, or confused, we can never be more than we are at any moment. I’m learning to stop striving, and just accept what, where, who, or how I am from day to day. But I’m still hoping to find a way beyond what I don’t know now, to what I won’t know in the future…
The seeker approached the disciple and asked respectfully, “what is the meaning of human life?”
The disciple consulted the works of his master and confidently replied, “Human life is nothing but the expression of God’s exuberance.”
When the seeker addressed the master himself with the same question, the master said, “I do not know.”
The seeker says, “I do not know.” That takes honesty. The master says, “I do not know.” That takes a mystic’s mind that knows things through unknowing. The disciple says, “I know.” That takes ignorance, in the form of borrowed knowledge.
– “The master does not know,” from the book The Song of the Bird by Anthony de Mello
So, until next time, I’m going to work on just being whoever I am – and just being, whoever I am. I need to keep searching for quite moments, and friends to lean on. I’m going to try less striving against life’s currents of circumstance, and more tuning in to the Master’s wavelengths; and hopefully, with a little grace, I will begin to find balance.
Peace,
Jason
The Seeker's Vow 