copyright Jal Feuerstack

I have been back in QC for just over a week, and already find the snowbanks more tiresome than astonishing. The daily melt is minimal but perceptible, measured against the lamp post in our front yard which was entirely covered and is now emerging. We can also see twice the amount of our neighbour's home up the hill.

All of this time off allows me to think (reflect, meditate) and catch up with others' blogs (as always, doberman pizza and Baha'i Views are well worth the meander through, both visually and conceptually). I have been reading (have I mentioned reading?) 'New Age' material and reflect upon the many gems of wisdom in Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. I am captured by a story he relates of the great spiritual leader and thinker, Krishnamurti, who said, it appears, "I don't mind what happens." In other words, if you derive your responses internally, from within your spiritual core, your joys and sorrows are not tempered by the winds of external fates.

I don't know if I "aspire" to this state: like some people with whom I've discussed the idea, I am doubtful that an absence of emotion is something to be desired, since our emotions can cue us to deeper awareness of our spiritual state (although that could be just another sign of ego). But I can see the value in the emotional state not being dictated by external realities. I do not wish to be subject to the whims and fancies of a mercurial world. I have enough whimsical and fanciful going on within me, to be bothered by the external 'realities'. Or, as Fred Alan Wolf might say, "There is no 'out there' out there." I have known for some time that race, religious differences, culture, and most aspects of human perception are socio-culturally constructed (what we think we see is what we think we believe). But if you are freed from these (through the transformative power of spiritual attunement, however you define this) then you allow yourself to be visited with the greater connective tissue of the spirit of the worlds of God.

It's a language issue, a body issue, a how-I-see-my-mind issue; all are inevitably flawed, because there is always the running and unconscious undermining of the ego. I get that. So I am reflecting on the synthesis of gratitude, hopefulness, and joy, with selflessness, detachment, and connection to the "Universe". I think it's about wanting God, more than anything else or anyone else: about the desire for mystical connection. And this "thinking" is giving me a lot to meditate about, in the quiet of this winter world.