i f o r

Banter, if you please – in favor of routine. I routinely resist (with shouts of Viva le Resistance!) the tenacious grip that devotion to discipline has on me. To succumb, to sign treaty – be overcome, would admit my need for things molded to shape my un-shapeliness. Our out-of-the-box cultural revolution detests, nay even blows its nose at, things routine, prescribed, set in sequence. And yet, the preponderance is such that without dedication to things that routinely challenge, we cannot change. Without repetition of exercise, we cannot grow. We must make peace with routine, she is ally.

t e n o h

The Encouraging Nature of Hardship. Everyone goes through hard times; some more than others, it would seem. What are we supposed to take away from those experiences that tend to wear us down and out, rather than hearten and encourage? Maybe we get more out of it than we think. Perhaps a kind of character that can’t be wrought elsewhere. Perhaps a stronger sense of perseverance. Perhaps a brand of tenacity that can’t be forged but in the furnace of adversity. If so, then, why do we shun the hard things? Why do I seek instead what can’t encourage me?

p t a

Pondering the absolutes – what they must be v. what I want them to be – I have concluded that I am no sound judge of such things, being mostly temporal and impermanent myself. Thoreau said, “When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality”. In sifting through all that variegated mental underbrush – separating proverbial wheat from immaterial chaff – I wonder how much of my own existence I have built upon the more transient and less than permanent?

s s

Stormy seasons, like this is proving to be, what with the wind whipping the trees with an effortless ease, reminds me to be thankful for the things that are solid and fixed in my life – lending a sense of stability. Root \rüt\: A progenitor, primary source, essential part. To be rooted suggests a vital connection to an essential source, a progenitor of sorts, through which a force can flow. Ground \grau̇nd\: The solid surface, something foundational, a conducting object. Rooted suggests a solid medium from which life and stability transmit. What am I rooting and grounding myself in today?

s f r

The strategy of a forced retreat. Rabbi Daniel Lapin says, “Life is full of stressful problems. We think we can’t afford to stop running. Sometimes we think we can’t even take the time to talk to God on a daily basis. Yet if we force ourselves to retreat, we will find that we are using time more efficiently, not less.” In other words, sleep, Sabbath and solitude can be synonyms for strategically strengthening our soul’s soundness. What could I do with stronger focus, further clarity, increased spiritual sensitivity and greater resolve against adversity in stressful seasons? Anything I wanted.

a p c s

A place called stuck is the only place I don’t want to be. They say adversity lies at the heart of every success. And I believe that’s true, because it offers a solution to the human dilemma, but that doesn’t mean I like it. Truth doesn’t always rub us the right way, like a Cheshire Cat we can’t just turn around and then disappear. But, when I’m feeling stuck, I want to aim that blame gun at everyone but myself. Self-improvement then becomes a struggle, something akin to the myth of Sisyphus: why was it he was never stuck?

s f a t d

Salutations from across the divide. Waves are funny, undulating tremors. Irrepressible, inexhaustible, and insatiable currents without definable starting or ending points, and yet waves are predictable, explainable and measurable determinates lacking only the specifics of coordinates. They exchange sagacious salutations of sorts – from one distant land to another; waves are the bearers of greetings and seedlings, resources and such. They too, like ships we are told, “speak each other in passing” but only for a moment followed by a heaving, bereaving as silence pauses for crashing sound to speak. And the end is when another land says hi.

s a t s

Solitude and the Sojourner. Some lonely pilgrims were called mystics, meaning an initiate of some mystery or secret wisdom. But nothing could be farther from the truth. These were not men trying to see what was not already plain, but rather trying to comprehend plain truth more fully. One of the more recent “mystics” put it this way, “Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.” Every sojourner must make time today for solitude.

l s j a p

From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Elliot

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

t p t s

The perfect thinking spot. There are few places like this; places that I like to go right after I finish a summer’s run. Places that keep my mind, holding it perfectly in time, just as the setting sun is settling in. It’s the creation of that rare, Celtic “time between times” moment. The rays hit just below the roof of the portico and just above the tree line, giving me blissful sunshine for an 8 and a 1/2 minute moment. In that time, in that perfect thinking spot, I ponder the mysteries of the universe and my own existence.