Stream of Consciousness

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Copyright 2021 Don Ray. Feel free to print and share.

There is of course only consciousness.  Our individual consciousness, this ensemble of experiences and choices, seamlessly flows through the temporal reality that provides the opportunities for contact and interaction with other individual elements of consciousness.

This material world accommodatingly provides some nominally rational continuity to facilitate that contact and interaction among us elements of consciousness.

It is all only consciousness, nothing but consciousness, though the material reality that serves as connective tissue binding together the elements of consciousness would seem to have the flexibility of concrete.

All our attention to the material world at the exclusion of prioritizing the Unity bond with other elements of consciousness misses the point, neglecting the opportunity for connection provided by that material world.  

We have only consciousness, incarcerated and blinded as it may be in this carnal existence, and that consciousness attains instantiation only to the degree it experiences interaction and Unity with Consciousness as a Whole (succinctly captured in the appellation “Christos”).  The opportunity for that interaction arises in no small part through the opportunities for interaction with other individual elements of consciousness (i.e. people).

The actual structure of Reality?:

• The foundation Word, the Source, that preceded this particular version of time in which we reside, 
• the individual elements of consciousness (us) that in the matrix of their interactions form the structure of the Whole Consciousness
• the continuity of flow of each of those elements as they segway through the ages  that we perceive as our lives, 
• the transition that we call death, though it is the antithesis of ending, 

This is the structure of Reality, a Reality necessarily flowing through the girders of this temporal/ physical framework , but a Reality not to be mistaken for being just this temporal/physical framework.

Don’t be enslaved, deluded, and deceived by the temporal and physical and carnal.  Use the temporal to create the eternal, apply the physical to touch the spiritual, accept this carnal as opportunity to embrace each others’ souls.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray. Feel free to print and share.

Trust Your Robot

TRUST YOUR ROBOT

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

On the question of whether robots and machines that listen and sympathize will prove adequate to comfort the human soul.  The following builds on previously published concepts of the ontological nature of consciousness, Unity, and Reality.  For readers lacking the earlier explanations, the first three paragraphs may be a bit perplexing.  Not to worry.  By paragraph four we’re independent of previous material and back to practical considerations.

In the absence of Choice there is no real consciousness.

In the absence of consciousness there is no Deep Unity.  In the absence of Deep Unity there is no Deep Reality Interaction and hence no eternal Love.

Nothing substantial is projected into eternity by interface with a machine that has no Choice in its interaction.  The machine’s words and responses may be the exact ones desired, but that exact perfection and accommodation will be as empty and meaningless as any lying sycophantic person seeking to ingratiate.  

I recently read of a robot that is selling well, a robot that seems to listen.  That such a device would become popular testifies to our desperation to communicate and be heard and be accepted.

The robot poses no threat of rejection or criticism or correction.  Lordy, wouldn’t that be wonderful?  I wonder if that is why writing appeals to me?  I have long known my writing would be at risk of totally changing if I expected that anyone would read it in my lifetime.  Do I treat the keyboard the way people treat their comforting empathy robot?  No doubt my writing is driven to some degree by the need to express and communicate.  

How desperately we all want to be heard!  How desperately we want to make ourselves, our thoughts and ideas and feelings and experiences, a part of something bigger, a part of someone else’s thoughts and experiences.  

So we talk to people who are not really listening and we pay people to listen to us and now we can buy robots programmed to trick us into believing they are listening.

All the while we just need to listen to each other.

To what degree can we or should we go to get people to listen?  Isn’t what we have to say the most important thing in the universe?  It certainly is the most important thing our youniverse.  

So people buy listening robots and I type.  The response from the machine is far more affirming and encouraging than most human responses, or lack thereof.

Desperate to be heard, we prattle on to the exclusion of ever listening, rendering mutually mute our efforts at communication.  Left with bored friends, coworkers, family, and spouses, we can soon add bored robots to the list.  Loathe to listen, we know our stories must be better than theirs.  So the talk goes on, and robot sales go up, and tweets and blogs and Facebook pages profligately propagate.

Never has so much been said and so little heard.  

We talk and type and text to everyone and everything within reach….

……..except God.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

A Higher Perspective

The ants flew this morning on their colony’s annual matrimonial breeding flight!

Now this afternoon an alate (winged ant) lands on me as I write!  What a little surprise blessing!  What a marvelous and miraculous focal point of life, that shiny black body with silvery wings.

Life arising from life.  We see life the way we do because of our experience of consciousness as an individual.   Viewed without the lens of individual experience Life becomes a wholeness, a flowing reaction.  Viewed from a distance, life is akin to a fire or a rising cumulus cloud, complex but comprehensible self-driving exothermic chemical reactions and thermo-dynamic processes.

Take away our individual awareness of pain and fear and death, and Life becomes a wondrous phenomenon to marvel at as it spreads across the planet and changes and evolves and adapts.  Viewed in detachment, all the carnivorous consumption and competitive combat become academic functionalities in a localized entropy storm.  .

But being part of that consumption and combat makes us look at life with other than detached academic objectivity.  We know all too well what it feels like to be prey and target.  Curiosity at the ability of chains of nucleic acids to self-replicate becomes our personal imperative to replicate.  

A biochemical process on a singularly rare blue marble orbiting a propitiously located star has been infused with conscious awareness, and henceforth demands that it, at least the individual elements of conscious experience, i.e. humanity, be taken into account in any speculation about universal Purpose and meaning.  

The little alate still sits on my shirt.  Its wings are now extended out perpendicular to its body instead of held along the length of its body.  I touch it.  It does not move in response.  Its life seems to have expired since landing on me minutes ago.  

I doubt it mused about meaning or Purpose.  I suspect it unambiguously, wholly, and completely knew its meaning and Purpose, and that was enough.  I, on the other hand, am not so sanguine about the whole Life, death, meaning, and Purpose thing, so I keep closely watching the tiny proboscis for signs of movement and life.  I watch to no avail.  

Now expired, but she-he-it did fly, earlier this morning, a triumphant launch carrying the  colony’s hopes into the unattainable sky.  The colony will never know this particular genetic package of hope lies now upside-down on a purple t-shirt.

This morning I cleaned out old files with records of students I had taught.  Those students would now be in their thirties.  Did my lessons help launch their lives on successful careers?  How many have kids of their own?  How many are under indictment?  How many are dead?  I will never know, just as the ant colony cannot know the fate of its hundreds of winged messengers launched this morning.

Surely localized, individual, and personal meaning and purpose must be part and parcel of universal meaning and Purpose.  But the extrapolation from this season or this semester to the eternal seems deucedly indirect, leaving us wondering, if we can ask the question must there necessarily be an answer?

My little deceased alate buddy would chuckle at my naivety.  Maybe asking the question is the meaning and Purpose.  Maybe that’s our version of the ant-colony’s’ matrimonial flight.  Let us launch forth in our conjectures, a triumph of this exothermic self-propogating life process, launching our questions and speculations, landing we know not where, but fulfilling, perchance even defining, even dare we say choosing, meaning and Purpose for the individual elements of conscious awareness infusing the sheen of organic material coating this exquisitely rare blue marble. 

Summary of Life

SUMMARY OF LIFE

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

What would I tell anyone?  What would I tell myself?

Life is surreal.  It doesn’t have surreal episodes as exceptions.  It is just surreal.

You will spend most of your life trying to belong and to survive.  You will pretty much do whatever society and situation demand to facilitate belonging and surviving.

Of necessity you will erect curtains of explanations to convince yourself you understand and to make sense of it all.  The curtains will be thick and will grow heavier with time in the effort to hide the fact they are woven out of imagination and wishful thinking.

The belonging and connections so desperately sought will exist at the most superficial and fragile level,  but great effort will be irredeemably invested in the effort to maintain these fragile facades so easily rendered to shreds by a trivial disagreement or misunderstanding.

Somewhere and somehow through all this, you, a kernel of conscious experience – information integration – and uninformed choices, will endure.  You will be shaped, and you will do some shaping.  The surreal nature of worldly life will prove to be a malleable matrix of circumstance that seems to chaotically and exasperatingly rage about you, but through it all is providing exactly the opportunities for Choice that will serve your growth…..or not…..that growth part is entirely up to you.

That’s it.  That’s the realistic graduation ceremony speech you will never hear.  At first it seems a dour and discouraging outlook.  You will find most realistic outlooks are dour and discouraging.

But look a little deeper…..at life, not the silly speech.  There is a freedom in all life’s seeming constraints, your ultimate freedom of Choice of response to those constraints.  There is growth, which is to say the essence and boundless potential of Life.  There is inescapable, if momentarily subsumed, awareness of the imperative of belonging and connection.  There is a capacity offered, which you can accept or reject, to see beauty.  

All in all, the dour and discouraging outlook turns out to be the facade, the deception, the distortion.  This world can afford to be surreal because it is so fleeting.  You on the other hand endure, as does the potential for the belonging and connection that you consciously or unconsciously crave.  Make the inescapable choices along the way.  Shape your nature and being, then discover you are actually slowly revealing your nature and being, an essence eternal, an essence always belonging and that always belonged.  

You will keep trying to belong and survive, as you must.  Along the way let yourself be born, born through the surreal storms, born into what you sought from the beginning.  

This world is surreal.  Love is real.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print an share.

Natural Faith

Natural Faith

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

Deer and coyotes

Deer stand on the trail above the gamboling coyote pups in the valley, a mother and yearling deer maybe.

The deer look down at the source of noise and motion and leave the trail to head for it!  They twist through the brush, negotiating openings and turning to go right into the middle of the bare spot where the coyotes play!

The pups scatter!

The deer head back up to the trail, the coyotes return to the opening.  The deer again focus their attention below the trail, again come down, the larger lead deer with its head down, moving with intent into the coyote area!  The coyotes again disappear but regroup in an adjacent opening in the brush.  The lead deer swings below the coyotes, then doubles back up the slope to where a few remain!

Finally, the pair of deer head back up the slope to the trail.  

The coyote family has regrouped a little further south in a different red dirt opening.  The deer now look in that direction, and now return down the slope to the new gathering spot, taking yet another pass at their canine neighbors, again breaking up the group!

Is this play?…or curiosity?…..or preemptive defense?……or establishing dominance to make a first impression in hopes of warding off later threat from the grown coyotes?

The deer return to their course on which they were travelling before the detour.  Puppy play resumes.

Running and chasing and spinning and boxing and running and running and running, flashing into view across the red soil in the gaps between the junipers across the valley, groups chasing this way then turning the tables and becoming the chased, cutting tight racing curves around the bases of the trees, pawing at their quarry as they catch it, full speed for the entire hour, so alive, so youthful, tails extended out in health and joy.

Finally puppy play winds down, and beautiful  coyotes pose majestically in sun lit open patches of bare soil, lying beside each other, 

Lying next to each other, rolling over, mouthing

Sitting so prettily, fur glowing white and red in morning sun.

.  It is a good morning, a very good morning.

Days later:

Coyote ridge, sunrise.

No little  coyote family.  I look and look to no avail.  I knew this day would come……but what’s that sound?  From the mini-slot canyon, it just might be….I cannot imagine anything else making that sound.

How they blessed my life!  What a dream come true. What a gift of presence and the Spirit and companionship and connection.  Thank You!  Thank You!  Thank You!

Little coyotes gone?  It had to be someday.  I will worry about them.  

Presence of Spirit, connection of essence of Spirit, deep sharing of Life, Nature and its children offer us that gift.  In Bodhi kitty’s little chattering conversations as you walk by, in his insistent and remarkable communication that he has pottied, in his excited running into the kitchen to get a treat, there is essence of life, a connection needing no extrapolation or interpretation, the other’s need and desire and joy my need and desire and joy.   

Coyote yelp!  No question!  Sounds like it is just beyond the south dam.  Looking for family?  Announcing capture of a treasure?  

The universe of the conscious experience, an expanding universe, for time is nothing more than the expansion of  conscious experience, always growing, always incorporating, even if fragile physical synaptic structures give the illusion of “past” and “forgotten” as connections break and decay.

The universes of the conscious experience, interfacing and bumping up against each other, colliding and conflicting, and on exquisitely rare and beautiful occasions overlapping.

These expanding universes of consciousness and awareness,  reluctantly incorporating the intersections of mutually shared experiences, yet craving mutually shared experiences, always prompt to take the opportunity to inject their conscious experience into the experience of the other, always resistant to having the other’s conscious experience absorbed into their own.

But in rare moments, in the scruffing of a kitty’s ear as it rubs its head against your hand, in the wordless communication that captures the ineffable bond between pet and human, in watching coyote puppies play and joust and race,  the overlap of the universes of conscious experience is shared and mutually experienced, not in mere communication and interaction at the edges of those expanding universes, but in actual overlap of the experience, mutually shared essence of experience.  In such wordless  moments we finally know what it is to not be alone.

————————–

At the ranch

One of the two big black horses was nuzzling the little pigs this morning, on and on before he knew I was watching, licking and grooming, the two little pigs together. 

So sweetly he treated the little pigs!….nuzzling and licking on and on as I kept my distance.  Instinct told me this was one of those glimpses into secrets of Nature, and once White-tummy horse noticed me the moment ended, little piggies going about their business.

All seems to fit this morning, in this sage moment, all seems to fit.  Each sound of bird and each imperceptible movement of damp air all fit into a Wholeness.  Mystery can wait, surely productivity can wait.  Some treasures are too precious to not lavishly spend.

“There will be time enough, there will be time enough” seems to whisper the Spirit as the hands race wildly around the watch dial.

————————

Hillside

So beautiful, this simple hillside.  So beautiful in peace and momentary safety.

The big yellow butterflies, the tall, tall green, the quiet, the blessed quiet.

Angels tread lightly in this tall grass, angels bringing their ministrations, bringing their manna for the soul.

Angels visit, invisible and inaudible, certainly not in white robes, though maybe in white jeans.

Angels visit and linger and even dwell, bringing tidings of presence and sustaining Spirit.

No wings these angels, for they have no need of wings.  Their message is a revealing of what soul already knows, written in runes and whispered in tongues.  Not to be taken too seriously, these incorporeal angels, easily mistaken for breeze or rustling grass.

So beautiful, so beautiful this hillside and its air, air that smells of life.  So precious, the feel of the texture of grass seed stalks 

Time abates, languorously flowing hand in hand with warm breeze.  This is no place for brazen miracles or amped up prophets.  This is prophecy for the taking, lessons rich and plentiful embedded in the miracle of this lush moment.

Green and blue meet in sharp and ragged edge, these colors of Source.  

Let a grass stalk brush your hand, listen well for what you may not hear but will understand without hearing.  Know without seeing, understand without hearing, fear not the mystery of Communion.

The only threat here is that you will miss the beauty, that you will hurry and miss how luxuriantly long a moment can be.  

Let air full of life fill your nostrils while a blank awareness full of Spirit fills your soul.  

Look intently at what most would call “nothing” and discern what the angels would tell you.  

Ride the ripples of time that give birth to moments eternal, yes, moments eternal that beckon to awareness.

See the futility of denial;  there is far more here than you might have hoped.  Carry it with you, this eternal moment, this knowing the unknowable, this seeing the unseeable, this understanding of the inexplicable.

Carry it with you that you may come Home.  

In time, in time, we will all learn as we are ready.  In time, in time, we will all share such moments. 

For now, let the angels dance.  Let them tend your soul, your long-neglected soul.  

————————————-

Frantic

The robin parents frantically cheep and cheep, or should I say cry and cry?  I hear one for the longest time up near the top of the Aspen tree.  From the other end of the area I heard it.  Are they calling a warning to the lost babies?  Are they letting them know to stay put, wherever they are under the foliage?

From the tree!  A baby!  At the corner!  Dad stays with it.  Dad stays low with it, near the ground, making the same call as the mother:  “cheep……cheep…….cheepcheepcheepcheepcheepcheep” the first two sharp and loud, then the last ones mumbled and trailing off.  They sound so frantic!  The baby makes little squeak sounds in response.  This baby is all the way to the fence. near the gate.  It flutters at the base of the fence.  Will it listen to dad?  Will it understand?  Louder squeaks!  Everyone is scared!  Dad is on the ground with it, then dad goes to a branch right above it.  The baby flutters to the base of the tree.  The little precious conversation of life and tenderness continues.  Dad flutters near the ground.  Mom makes her call still from up high.  The baby heads to the sunflowers.  It is too active!   It should stay still!  I want to put it in the nest!…..but I fear that would only multiply stress and compound problems.  The baby sits on a rock fully out in the open.  It needs days before it can fly!  It sounds so lost and forlorn and scared and perplexed and puzzled and worried!  It flutters toward me.  Surely it would never sit still in the nest again.

The little one hops under the overhang with me!  It hops onto my foot!  Such plaintive little chirps!  It stays some time on my foot.  Should I again try to put it in its homey cozy little nest?  Has its adventure satisfied it and is it ready to go home?  Would it stay this time?  What to do?!  What not to do?!  It hops off, looking for home, reaching the base of the stairs that lead to its home.  Oh, to rescue it!  

It wanders around, its oversized feet hopping under the roof, its undersized wings unable to even fly over the drainpipe.  I hear rain drops.  I hear thunder.  The best place for it is surely under the overhang right where I sit.  It has gone around the corner.  Mom cries.  Dad cries.  The baby cries.  The fate of the other two baby robins remains unknown.  Hopefully one remains in the nest.  

——————-

Is this what happened to us?  Did we leave the nest too soon?  In good time would we have been given access to the Tree of Knowledge?  Is that why we are so lost and confused, having simply stretched our wings too early, falling out of the Garden, not yet ready for our inheritance as children of God.  So God calls from on high, the  Christos comes down to our level, we all cry and seek shelter from the storms.  

Robin dad still calls from the pine tree.  

Fledging

This world is merely a launching point.  To understand the Purpose and Reality of the stew while just looking at the iron pot is impossible.  This world is the iron pot.  But the feast in preparation is not evident if you just study the iron.

This world is preparing the feast of Love, a purified Love of the highest form.  The pot of this physical world boils and mixes the conscious life in a chaotic mix of unpredictable roiling bubbles and steam.  It is madness, this world, mad and maddening chaos instituted by the sizzling pot.  But out of that cauldron of churning madness is distilled pure Love.

All the generosity and compassion we can muster will never fix the world.  But all that generosity and compassion  creates the pure Love that endures through eternity.  The world is never fixed, yet not one whit of selfless Love ever goes to waste.  

We experience only the physical structure of the iron pot and the chaos induced at its simmering surface.  So we struggle as we should to end the wars and the bigotry and the homelessness.  In the process we change and heal lives.  But the world still has the wars and the homeless and the suffering and it always will.  It always will until this age passes, and it always will provide fertile ground for creating the senseless, irrational Love that is eternal. 

And God looked upon it with the deepest of sorrows and said “it is good, it is very good”.

———————————-

Living in faith means of necessity living in contradiction to the world.  Prayer is not evidently productive; to listen to God and Spirit is to not listen to advice and demands of this world.  

Living in faith means not prioritizing all the things that the world prioritizes.  Living in faith is crazy.  The faith commitment will for a while move forward in the illusion that faith and prayer will be consistent with the unfolding of worldly circumstances.  But sooner or later comes the painful realization that faith demands a path so divergent from the practicalities of career and social popularity and productivity and security and wealth accrual that faith is demanding something really crazy, and making that demand without guarantee of outcome.  Through the heart, through ineffable longing, through an inscrutable rightness, through irresistible temptation away from common sense and security, faith proffers its offers, and we linger a little too long, feel a little too right, immerse irretrievably too deeply in that baptism that makes no sense to anyone else, and if we dare admit it, makes no sense to us.

We may turn from it for a while, worldly logic and necessity may momentarily prevail, but we can never forget our affair with faith, that glimpse of something we do not yet recognize, that touch so foreign and familiar……faith….mad, maddening, marvelous, motivating faith, senseless, pointless, and essential.

 Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

Three Principles

THREE PRINCIPLES

Posted by Don Ray 2021. Feel free to print and share.

Were we to boil everything down to three principles:

* Unity, meaning the strengthening of all individuals as individuals, and then the strengthening of the bonds among those individuals, is the overarching calling, direction, objective, and joy for which we (unknowingly) strive in this life and are destined in eternal Life.

* Genuine spiritual practice and authentic worship ultimately is summarized in how you treat all living forms and beings placed before you.  

* The Creative force of Love, called Christos by some, underlies all existence.  You are not alone.  

Posted by Don Ray, 2021. Feel free to print and share.

Seeing Through Our Dreams and Scars

SEEING THROUGH OUR DREAMS AND SCARS

Copyright 2021 Don Ray. Feel free to print and share.

What would I see?

I’m not asking to see anymore.

I will see what I’m supposed to see.

I see blessings.

I ask not for visions but for open eyes to see what is right in front of me.

Peace in not knowing.  Peace in the condition.

Peace with the changes of time.

The perspectives of age are not necessarily right, but instead reflect what we became.  The perspectives of youth are distorted by what we wish to become.  Scars and imagination distort our views from either end of life.  Fortunately, in between life keeps us sufficiently occupied to not be too deceived by the distortions of our dreams and scars.

Most of all we are blind to what we are.  That also is just as well.  

Eventually we figure out there is very little to see that is not of our own making.  If this leads to the further deception that there is nothing beyond that of our own making our souls are rendered destitute and hopeless.

With luck and faith, we will discern that in the absence of specific sights and visions there is still much to perceive.  We want to see, for seeing is delightfully specific and incontrovertible.  But what matters, what is real, is not constrained to this temporal – corporeal existence discernable by photons impinging upon retinas.  

In this life there is very little to see beyond our worldly contrivances, but there is an infinity to sense, discern, and know.  Life consists of learning these more subtle discernments that are liberated from corporeal perceptions.  Soul consists of what we do with those discernments.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray. Feel Free to print and share.   

Combat and Compassion

COMBAT AND COMPASSION

Copyright 2021 Don Ray. Feel free to print and share.

People are generally as programmed in their behavior as any cat or dog.  Acknowledging that fact makes forgiveness a little easier.  Perhaps the role of spiritual practice and well-practiced religion is to liberate people from their programming.  The fear and anger and lust and stupidity abide, but we are empowered to at least slightly temper them, to take some nominal responsibility for our actions, or better said, to submit our course of action to a higher influence, something more noble than genetic programming and parental abuse.

In exploring that potential, we see the Christos in all, in the paradoxical opportunities for a Creation based on claw and combat to give rise to decency, compassion, and Love.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray. Feel free to print and share.  

Unnatural Peace

UNNATURAL PEACE

Copyright 2021 Don Ray. Feel free to print and share.

PEACE!  Scream it loudly.  Grab people by the shoulders and scream it into their face.  Force people to experience it.  Demand it.  Make it legally binding.

Well, why not.  Nothing else has worked to get either individuals or nations to take seriously the pursuit of peace.

Perhaps there is nothing natural or automatic about peace.  Our genetic evolutionary background prepares us for mass sporting events and mindless entertainment and serving in the army, but not for peace.  The pursuit of peace, inner or international, was never a prerequisite to survival.  

Cultivate crops, kill food, compile money, these reflect our genetic inheritance.  Conquer, combat, control, these have sustained our survival.  

Pursue peace?!  From where did such an impracticality arise?  Exactly.  That is the question.  For it does arise, a longing, an instinct, an evolutionary anomaly never quite fully quieted by even a few million years of fang and claw survival.

Pursue peace.  Whence arises this nagging admonition?  Why do we wish it were viable, even if we don’t believe it is?  All that has made us human, uncompromising biological and societal evolutionary dictates, lead not to meditation or mediation.  

Peace.  Within and between.  Still unrealistic after all these millennia.  But what about the next millennia?  Do we not hope that our descendants might individually and collectively experience a little more peace than we?  Might it be that it is not our carnal evolutionary development that has made us human, but “human”, in the greatest potential of that word, is what we are called to in spite of that family background of survival of the most ruthless.  

Pursuit of peace, an indefensible longing detracting from personal productivity and risking tribal vulnerability.  

Longing for Peace, a whispering hint of the nature and potential of our souls, of what “human” can mean when liberated from the carnal evolution with which Creation and Creator cast us toward our destiny.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray. Feel free to print and share.

Coyote Creation

COYOTE CREATION

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.

On ridge, hoping for a glimpse of the little coyote family

Heard them last night, a soft little collection of yips, not far away I suspect.

The sharp angle of penetrating light of rising sun sweeps orange down the west walls of the valley, rich greens of the cool shadowed valley floor soon to glow with yellow summer sun.

Yeshu (Jesus) wept over our condition, not just our suffering and misery, but the spiritual condition that fosters that misery.  What happened?!  Were we really once in the Garden?  Did we really once know a life and place without fear, a place where no form had to have big ears to hear predators or sharp fangs to penetrate flesh?  Is the nature of this present temporal world in response to our chosen nature, a reflection of our chosen condition of collapse into ourselves?…….a reflection of us, we elements of the collective consciousness of Eve and Adam, boldly entering into the act of Creation, Creation no longer an external work of divine art, but Creation now part of us and we part of it.

Coyote!  I did get to see her!…..trotting fast…..she’s late…..racing along the south valley path toward the headwall……stopping only twice to look intently in the direction of the center with its heavy cover of brush.  Did the pups behave themselves?  Are they still in place?  Are they safe, these little fuzzy treasures and reason for her existence.

A following pestering magpie marks the coyote mom’s location as she disappears into the brush.  I resist the temptation to follow, this haggard mother having already enough stress.  

Thank You!  Thank You!  Thank You!

There are no answers in this scene, at least none I can yet understand.  But there is sublime ineffable beauty, Purpose evident even though inscrutable.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print and share.