March 31, 2025

Low Tide — Beaufort, South Carolina, Marshland
We have to make sense of our life. 
Who are we?
What are we about?
What are we doing here?
Where are we going?
What is going on?

We are gradually waking up
over the full course of our life,
and yet, we are constantly
putting ourselves to sleep
with the hypnotic repetition
of what we have been told
of the corporate story of our existence
as a species and what it means
to be who we are here, now.

So there is our inherited story,
and the story that we make up
out of our own personal experience
which we work to blend together
into a narrative that makes sense
while blurring from time to time
into utter nonsense.

Taking what we are handed
and fitting that into our lived experience
in a way that corroborates and affirms
the steady flow of how things are
comes to grief time and again upon the facts
that things do not fit.

God doesn't fit.
Compassion runs afoul of greed
and selfishness.
War comes out of nowhere,
yet never goes away.
We live in ways that do not support life.
The lists of how this conflicts with that
are endless.
The Cosmos is not a harmonious, well-balanced,
and mutually supporting whole
that makes perfect sense.
We have to make allowances
and ignore contradictions and conflicts all the time,
while closing ourselves off from noise, disruption,
complexity and confusion everywhere we can, in order to
drop into the emptiness/stillness/silence
and tune into ourselves to take a reading,
know what's what, what is called for, here, now.

The essence of Buddhism, Christianity
and all religion is diversion, distraction, denial,
pretension, addiction, delusion,hokum and nonsense,
where we mostly ignore what we know
in order to affirm what we are told to think/believe
"for the good of the whole."

It is a collusion conspiracy that we are all a part of
for the sake of the peace and consolation of ourselves.
And it is running aground upon the facts,
like climate change, that will not be denied forever.

No one is in charge and Trump has lit the fuse.

My advice is to trust ourselves to our intuitive sense
of what's what and what is called for here, now.
Do that when/where/how it needs to be done
without needing to know and do more than that.

Start with learning to know and trust your intuitive sense--
which used to be called, "Listening for God's will."

It got us to this point.
It is well-suited to take us the rest of the way.

Published by jimwdollar

I'm retired, and still finding my way--but now, I don't have to pretend that I know what I'm doing. I retired after 40.5 years as a minister in the Presbyterian Church USA, serving churches in Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina. I graduated from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, in Austin, Texas, and Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. My wife, Judy, and I have three daughters, five granddaughters, one great granddaughter, and a great grandson on the way, within about ten minutes from where we live--and are enjoying our retirement as much as we have ever enjoyed anything.

2 thoughts on “March 31, 2025

  1. A stunning photograph and words that I ponder as I muse back on the experiences of a lifetime at age 78. Thank you.

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  2. We are equipped from birth with what it takes to survive practically anywhere, which is boosted considerably by surrounding ourselves with the right kind of people. We do that by trusting our intuition to select our friends for us. The Resonance Effect is not to be ignored. Neither is the Enthusiasm Effect. If it doesn’t resonate with you and cause your little heart to sing and your little toes to dance, don’t have anything to do with it. No matter how much money it could make for you.

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