From an Upper Floor

Are you connected to your home?  Would removing you from it remove you from your memories,  to what you have learned, to what you love not because of how it looks but because of what you have invested?  A wandering brother once said that he never felt like I did and he had lived in many houses because of his work.  To be a home it must be invested with the soul of one, with the emotions and with the love.

It should take two people to build a home and a family.   But in many cases, too many of late, it is but one.   It can be one of meagre surroundings.   It can be of any type, in any country, in any place.   But with the place should be invested the emotional growth and in recollection, should be one of acceptance.   If the place is simply a house,  a place to sleep in and a place to leave, we have a rootless society, with no connection either to themselves or to their place of origin.  And their origin means the place where they became aware of themselves and respected for their persons.

When a place is created that is secure in the minds of the children, when what is created is of love, then what is given is a freedom to fly and then to come back.   Not necessarily to the physical place but to the secure emotional place within that has given them a rooting.  Those with no penchant for traveling will in time realize that rooting is taken with them and is not lost.  But for those whose hearts are secured within the place they have given their best, have taken their responsibilities to the highest and best they could envision, these attributes give to the children and the adults a confidence that world events cannot shake.   It gives them a grounding where the earth itself becomes home and a love for it that never dims.

They will forever hear in their minds and hearts the voice who greeted the morning and was servant to the day.   This is where the heart rests.   They will feel their connection to their earth no matter where their home is.   They do not spend their lives looking for a place to call home because they were rooted when it was necessary by those who loved them.   They will find wherever they are that they are at home.  The earth will never be an alien place, a foreign place.

Where the heart is will always be home.

Those of us who have hopes, hold tightly to them.  I have found  during this life that there is insufficient time to enclose them all.  There is not enough time to focus on them as well as our commitments.  And we don’t know this up between the eyes at the time we make our first commitment.   Because we are honorable peoples, we stay the route and run out of time which takes us with it.   The commitments we go into, with part of us still wishing hopes fulfilled,  take energy into their cause.   So the girl who wished to write teaches her children and they become fine writers.   And she who created in the kitchen for her brothers teaches her children how to create with their hands, with their minds,  in the pleasure of the fields in all weather.  She teaches the glory of creation with reverence.  We learn what we can do with what we have and are richer for it.

We watch our children make commitments with their desires running alongside, to find that they must shelve portions of them we term dreams (because they are not yet physical) and tend to the needs of commitments.   And then we wish that each generation will be aware of consequences when decisions are made that prevent desire’s fulfillment.   Failure?  Giving up?   No,  just reality doing a check.  Humans must be a priority, especially when we make them.   What values would have gone into a dream are instilled instead, in commitments.  We learn early that our hearts teach us in ways the world cannot.

And the dreams of value,  either genetically impregnated or morally ensconced,will have their day either here or elsewhere.   And the dream being of noble quality demands a someone of noble quality to carry it.   If the progeny carry their commitments with honor, their dreams will be carried by a someone with honor.   Our hopes, if passed to one with memory who cherishes these, will be fulfilled.  And we will be the person of quality who dreamed the desire into being.  When we have worked the dailyness,  laid the groundwork,   done the footwork, and have ploughed the field to make it ready to work, the hope will be a reality.

All of Life is carefully balanced.

Photo by John Hallissey

Dear Dr. . . . .

I presume it is Dr. though I did not see the title,  I feel it is richly deserved.  If you would please excuse me for not offering my gratitude for your perusal and comments on my work.  Life has a way of intervening and commitments cannot wait.

The work I refer to,  just to refresh memory,  was the poetry and the essays that my friend. . . so kindly asked you to look at.   The material reviewed you said was challenging and intriguing and I thank you.  Challenging and intriguing nowadays is not the stuffs of the marketplace.  In fact,  what can be easily identified, especially the familiar, is what is marketable.  This is not to put the onus on people,  though it seems that to massage the brain into greater activity is not thought of as fun.   That is too bad.   To my thinking, the purpose of this physical life is to learn but from the observation of the majority,  its purpose is to entertain.   The gods,  I understand,  even hide the lessons in toys.

With the challenges of earning a living,  there is little energy left to try and change much of anything.  To inject new thought or old thought spoken in today’s language,  puts one on the defensive.  The old adage of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’  seems to be what is propelling everyone.  Except things are broken, old ideas, old habits and a first rate intelligence is not required to see that the results are no longer sufficient.  Ideas and values must expand to fit the larger scope, not abandoned altogether.

Physical and mental boundaries are not finite.   We often speak disparagingly of primitive religions.  Simple observation tells us that as a technological society we have lost the spirituality that once united the simpler life with the cosmos.  And we are the loser.   We speak of life everlasting and yet are afraid to die.  We speak of the resurrection and buy cemetery plots so we will be remembered.  We send crossed signals.

When I wrote the essay, Concerning:  Creation 101 I wished to bring forth several ideas to show we are Creationists.  Individually and en masse we create the climate for what happens in our world.  I came upon a book by Robert Nozick called The Examined Life.   He wrote this while on sabbatical from Harvard and in it, to my surprise,  he announces that perhaps we are in the creation business and are discovering one way it can be done.   And he brings forth the idea that we are apprentices and perhaps will be in charge of something else, anon.

This again says that mental boundaries no longer exist.   There is a Spirit afoot that will speak and to ears and hearts that are open , they will hear.   There are those whose brains are open albeit a tiny percentage more than the average and to them will be given messages transformed  into ideas that will be grounded in this world.   To those whose eyes are open,  they will interpret the writings on the walls.

I realize that my ideas are not new ones but I try to speak in the vernacular.  All life is simultaneous.   When a philosopher like Robert Nozick comes up with creation apprenticeship, someone like me, or maybe many someones also pick up the idea at the same time.  Eden was Earth,  everywhere.   According to where one stood.   Maverick thinking?  Possibly but I think not.   My scope had to broaden to contain my commitments.

Thank you for your time and effort.   I did want to explain myself further.   Whether my lifetime will bear me out, I leave to the heavens.   They still hold the sparklers, contrary to what Man thinks.  I bless,

(I came across this copy of a letter to a Professor of Theology and Philosophy of a large university who was a friend of a friend.   It was in a journal entry of 1991.  The mills of the gods grind slowly.)