Home again

Medical waiting room, yesterday, 2:30

I told A I don’t want her to travel to anybody else’s house again!  I think I mean it. Be that as may be. 

Thank you for my playful little dog and a beautiful autumn day  Sunshine and Cool Air

And thank you for the McDonald employee yesterday who may have been another one of your angels. A middle-aged, friendly Mainer who looked like she’d seen a thing or two and smiled even wider, saying, “I like my job” when I complimented her. TNJ again.

More to remember from Lee van Laer, A constant joy, Inner Christianity Substack yesterday

I come here to my life now in my 70’s with the twin burdens of conscience and remorse, which are hard enough to earn— and harder to carry—that one wonders why one would even bother to acquire them, seeing as so many folk live out their whole lives without the inconveniences and nuisances of either. 

I carry them in the rightful cosmological sorrow a being of substance ought to absorb and become responsible for, although I always question whether or not I have done enough in this area to become worthy—almost certainly, I have not. Yet another stone to add to the bag.

Yet despite all this, I can assure you, there is a constant joy that flows into being.

It is a strange thing; for, it turns out—at least as far as I understand it—that that joy would never be here but for the suffering I’ve endured, and which even now must always—as is ever the case— form the true foundation of Being in this cosmos.

This is an objective fact that can only be appreciated with age; here, one begins at last to know what Gurdjieff meant when he spoke of these things. They are serious matters, matters for men and women of a certain age who have worked, so to speak, “with blinders on” for many years, struggling to understand ideas no one, objectively, will ever understand, and confidently asserting countless falsehoods on the way to actual humility. For those of us fortunate enough to taste it—many fall by the wayside and refuse the gift— this seasoning is ultimately conferred both from the distances and the close proximities of our memory and life. 

It comes, in the end, only to help us.

Yes, they are serious matters, and as I put it to myself this morning, it stands thus:

We’re put here on the surface of this planet to receive God’s Grace. Why God has done this is inscrutable and will ever remain so. Indeed, as we judge from dimly lit interiors, the fortresses of our tiny little lives, it even appears to be a folly of some kind on His part.

Yet here it is; and the Grace keeps flowing.

Knowing, then, that this strange and wondrous Grace is ever present, flowing into Being everywhere to make birds sing, and worms crawl, and clouds enshrine the glory of the sky:

knowing this, why do I forsake the Grace and replace it with the dark words, and darker worlds, of man’s construction?

I could turn my face towards the light; and yet I forget, until that gentle hand that always hold the soul turns me back towards it—and always with a love that cannot be measured.