Life!
I'm having coffee with my friend Karen, talking about unemployment, and the phone rings. It's someone from Looking Glass who wants to interview me Monday. I am thrown by the whole thing. I don't know if I want to work for another non-profit. Karen says: "Maybe there's one more job you have to do," pause, "Train one more crew." I know it is one of those things that you know you need to hear, but don't want to. She's done this to me before. Once when I was in a surprising good form on the bike, and it had occured to me that I might be able to do my default Eugene Lorane Eugene ride, a very difficult ride, in under seven hours; I had referred to this as being "On the edge of the impossible." I had decided that for me it was impossible to do under seven hours, and experienced this profound wonder as each time I got closer and closer. I could literally contemplate "impossible" as I did it. I told Karen about this. She said: "Do you think that it matters that you think it is impossible?" Ding! Light bulb! The next time I went out and did it under seven hours by about five minutes.
So the plan for the interview is to simply go with an open mind. After all, I have learned that I am not the one making the plans. It was not my plan to leave a previous job, nor to end up at RAP. The result though was learning to do Wisdom Journeys, a technique that I know was life-changing for some. And further it was to put me in touch with my own deeper Self who likely is the one making the plans. So I don't know right now what those plans are, but must stay open.
The cemetary in the phote is a place along Powerline Road where I often stop on my Brownsville loop. It is a view across the valley from beneath hundred year old maples, a cool oasis on hot summer days. I have never found the place with it's death as threatening. Rather it seems a place of on-going life. Today is the celebration of the death of Lady Palmo. Tibetans have a different view of death, more of a certainty of the outcome. So many times I have been at a funeral where someone says: "He's in a better place." We nod our heads, seemingly sure of this, then go back to our own lives wondering whether we are destined for heaven or hell, determined by the number and degree of the evils we have committed. This is a concept that I have always been uncomfortable with, and so choose to see life, and death as a celebration not unlike the Tibetans. So here's to life, it's wonder, it's motion "like a train that drives on through the night."