true love

"The adolescent in me wants either an easy romanticism or a special kind of suffering, of which I am the center." (Alan Jones)

Today I spent an hour in beloved books - books on spiritual life and soul making. When I come upon a sentence like the one above I burst into laughter at the beauty and truth of it - in a few words the writer nails me right where I live in I just revel.

Which reminds me how much I love to research, how totally joyful the quest to understand is to my soul, how I love reading and books, how I miss having study as my main work.

Mine is a life that is at least partly post-modern. Unlike some of my contemporaries, this is not a fearful but an explosive joy for me. It means, in my admittedly simple understanding, that the roads of the future are littered with random discoveries waiting for me.

The year my youngest was born several stars converged for us. We moved to a small town in Alberta where we could live well with one car. We inherited from an old barn an antique bike with one gear and a peddle that went 'clunk' every time it was forward. And I had the other two in school. So I would put my little one on the not safety approved kid seat and we would peddle around town. Every day. For five years. I played a game with him that we were looking for treasure. If he saw something that caught his eye we would stop and pick it up, always returning home with pockets full of feathers, rocks, bits of flotsum that the earth had coughed up.

When he went to school he had never watched Sesame Street, didn't quite know his alphabet, and had a lion sized imagination. His teacher was initially disappointed in him for his lack of book knowledge. Later she said he was the most secure child she had taught.

That aside, I am still looking for treasures, one of the best being the discovery of a pure thought that puts music in my heart. This fall I have the chance to revisit some of these old sources and suck the juices again.