Finding our way to The Way one situation at a time. I don't know how great it will be, but I expect it will be interesting, and I look forward to it going on past all reason because wonder is just that way. Are you coming or not?
Smoky Woods 01 2008 –Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Big Creek District, Waterville, North Carolina access
This text is found in Deuteronomy:
It is not in heaven, that you should need to ask, ‘Who will ascend into heaven to get it for us and proclaim it, that we may obey it?’ And it is not beyond the sea, that you should need to ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to get it for us and proclaim it, that we may obey it?’ But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you may obey it.
And this is found in the Gospel of Thomas:
Jesus said, "It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”
We have no idea who was given to say/write these passages originally, but. We are free to imagine both of them arising from the intuition of the persons responsible for giving them shape and form in the language in which they first appeared.
Read the passages as a message from our intrinsic and united intuition, and you are onto something about you and the wonder of your own intuition.
Intuition is the source of God. God is our projection of the source of our inspiration--but our intuitive imagination is the source of our realization. We interpret our own intuition as being of God, when it is God that is our interpretation of our own intuition.
Revelation is an inside job.
Ironic, don't you think? We make God in our own image, and God becomes who we say God is. And it is a cosmic circle, beginning and ending in ourselves. "And the end of all our exploring will be to find where we started and know the place for the first time" (T.S. Eliot).
Bog River Flow 01 2014 — Adirondack Park, Tupper Lake, New York, from the lower dam
It is hard to tell how old a rock is. Not that it matters. No one cares. Not even the rocks care. We all have more important things to do. Well, maybe not the rocks. Caring doesn't count with rocks. Everything is equally insignificant to a rock.
Leaving me to wonder at what point do things begin to take on significance for us? And fade into insignificance? What leads us to rank things as we do on our own personal/private significance scale?
How do we determine what is important and what is unimportant? Who says so? Do we say things are important that don't matter to us at all? And we say they are because we are supposed to in order to please someone to whom they are important?
Who would be pleased with us for saying some things are important and other things are not important? Is it important to us that we live to please someone other than us? Who(m) are we living to please? What makes that important? Who says so? How do we know what is important? How do we come to value what we value?
Windows 2014 — Horton House Ruins, Jekyll Island, Georgia
The things that interest us. The things that ignite our enthusiasm. The things we enjoy doing. The things that are meaningful to us. Are the things that bring us to life.
Without them we are dead, just whiling away the hours until the county coroner makes it official.
I was born into an atmosphere where everyone was dead, going through the motions of life, waiting for the declaration affirming what had been the case for years.
You may know what it is like being a baby, then a child, among the dead and dying back in your little town.
If so, you remember the gloom, astounded into your old age that no one ever awakened to the problem and did something about it.
Why remain forever dead when it is only a matter of looking until you find something interesting and allow it to bring you to life?
I never heard anyone in my little town ask a question fresh from the womb of curiosity and wonder. Even their questions were dead.
Real questions were forbidden, for they would have required thinking, and dead people are beyond thinking, or caring about anything but the announcement freeing them from the burden of pretending to be alive.
Graham Cabin 02 2014 — Anne Springs Close Greenway, Fort Mill, South Carolina
Doing what is called for in each situation as it arises is all it takes.
We get distracted by desire, fear and duty, and 10,000 other things.
But the basics remain the same over time throughout the ages.
Focus and presence, kid. Focus and presence.
We live to discover who we are and what we are about, simply by being who we are, doing what we are about.
Keeping an eye on our original nature, our innate virtues (What we do best and love doing most), and our intrinsic intuition.
Being here, now, is openness to here, now-- without prejudice, favoritism, preference or opinion. Just seeing, just hearing, just perceiving, just knowing, just doing what is called for when, where, how it is called for.
How would you improve this process? Why would you think it needs improvement? Just being "as one thus come" here, now and doing what is called for in response: Chopping wood, carrying water. Eating when hungry, resting when tired...
"Improvement" is interference! Let things be as they are, here, now, and forever, and doing what is called for, when, how and where.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf said, "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
And we have help with that. Our intrinsic intuition is with us to guide us all along the way.
All we have to do is dispense with ambition, aspiration, intention, desire and the will to have our way no matter what.
Once we get that out of the way and open ourselves to the emptiness/stillness/silence (One thing not three) we wait there for our intuition to nudge us in the direction of what is called for in each situation as it arises.
At that point, we turn to our original nature, our innate virtues (What we do best and enjoy doing most) to see what we have that might be helpful in the work to do what needs to be done here, now.
What to do with our life is not a problem to be solved, but a joy to be experienced by doing what we are good at in ways it is needed.
Life comes to us with its needs and we serve it with our gifts (Once we get our plans, agendas and timetables out of the way).
Fenced Out, Fogged In, 2014 — Six-Mile Creek Road, Lancaster County, South Carolina
All of my seminary professors were brilliant people. They talked about God loving us unconditionally against the backdrop of the Vietnam war and the assassination of Martin Luther King the the bit about being sent to hell for not believing the bit about God's unconditional love.
As though there were no contradictions, discrepancies, inconsistencies within the mix of the times.
They were brilliant without awareness of the dichotomies at work in their lives.
A ten year-old Sunday School student asked me, "When am I going to understand what's going on around here?" I don't remember what I told her, but I wish it had been, "If you are looking for things to make sense, you have to throw something out."
That's what I would tell her now, for sure.
We have to throw out the nonsense and see what we can do with what remains.
No God, no theology, no doctrines, no dogma, no dharma, no creeds, no catechisms... just you and me and our original nature, our innate virtues-- the things we do best and enjoy doing most-- and our intrinsic intuition.
Our virtues include our creativity, the arts, literature, poetry, music... all the good stuff humans are capable of producing.
The good stuff holds it together when the bad stuff threatens to destroy it entirely.
With the good stuff at the heart of our life, and living to serve our intuition and do what is called for in each situation as it arises, for the joy of doing it and the satisfaction of having done it alone-- with nothing in it for us but the wonder of being who we are.
The old Taoists built the spiritual foundation of their existence out of no more than that-- doing what needed to be done when, where and how it needed to be done all their life long. Because that is who we are. That is what we do.
There doesn't need to be any more to it than that.
Tortoise 02 2014 — St. Augustine Alligator Park and Rookery, St. Augustine, Florida
The Buddha and Jesus were as neurotic as the rest of us, and given to panic attacks, frustration and uncertainty.
They, too, wrestled with Desire, Fear, Duty.
And they found the way through the right kind of emptiness, stillness and silence, just as we do.
And they couldn't tell us anything we can't know for ourselves just by reflecting quietly on our daily experiences with life and our responses to those experiences.
We all are self taught.
The only thing teachers are good for is telling us to listen to ourselves.
This old tortoise figures everything out for her/him-self. So do we all.
White Egret 01 2014 — Audubon Swamp Gardens, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, South Carolina
If hurricanes and other natural disasters are going to reshape our lives to fit the contours of a new world, we need to get creative really fast. We are out of time. And rebuilding the way it was is just putting off adjusting to the new constraints and requirements.
For example: People are rebuilding homes that have been swept into the sea by moving 100 feet or so from their old foundations.
Reality will finally win, but it will be a long, grueling, fight.
We aren't known for our ability to take "No!" for an answer-- and have only ourselves to blame for the "No's" we want to ignore.
The New World will not care at all for our wants and wishes when it delivers its requirements and time table to our door steps.
I would like to watch how it plays out, but I will be glad to miss it as well.
Baxter Creek Bridge 2008 — Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Big Creek District, Waterville, NC, access
Collecting images "in the field" was the high point in landscape photogaphy for me.
Walking up on them-- which is different from waking upon them, which sounds like I am treading them underfoot-- wandering through them, taking time with them, bought me to life in ways that finding the right word or phrase does for my writing side.
Joy unfolding by being there, then. Which is not the same as exploring/deciding how to present them with the wonders of Photoshop here, now. That is a different kind of joy, but joy, nonetheless.
Which gets us to the crux of the matter: The joy of doing it and the satisfaction of having done it.
Where in your life have you/do you find those experiences coming to your rescue in the ho-hum-hum-drum of existence?
What do you do that brings you to life? Where do you find life pouring over, spilling out, running on and on?
Partnering up with our intuition in living in ways that call us to life here, now, is always available to us as the gift of meditative playfulness with our circumstances as they develop around us.
With intuition pulling us into aspects of our situation to startle us with surprise and delight as things work out before our eyes in ways we did not foresee and could not imagine.
The gifts of intuition keep on coming in places we least expect it. And leave us wondering what she is up to now, and will do next-- and eager to find out!
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 