March 31, 2024
Easter Sunday. The foundational creative event that launched the Christian Church. Seems like an appropriate moment to start something new in my own life. Writing. Pinning down some of the multi-directional thoughts that my mind spills out on any given day. Not just my mind. My emotions. And my spirit. Something inside that is corollary to mind and emotion, that runs deeper, eschewing guidance from rails or worn paths, flowing across thoughts and feelings with an invitation to ‘come and let us learn and launch out together.’
I confess to being a bit fearful. I really don’t know where I am going in all of this. I have spent much time building and maintaining boxes to provide separate living quarters for these elements. I largely viewed them as competitors fighting for time and space as I naively searched my way through life. And I was committed to the pre-eminence of mind. Everything had to ‘make sense’ or it wasn’t worthwhile. Yet, in more recent years, I find myself responding with deep feelings to an awareness, an event, a situation. These emotional expressions can so easily be just a puff of wind into a prevailing breeze. But, if companioned to the expansive realms of spirit, they can provide fuel for an ever-increasing global awareness of true and new realities.
So, back to Easter Sunday. I don’t presume your personal posture as participating in a Christian worldview. I respect your paradigm for making sense of all the variables of life and living. But allow me to wrap this monologue with reference to Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday. He ended what he had begun by laying out and laying down everything associated with the full life. With mind he could say, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” With soul (emotion) – “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Then, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” and “It is finished” – and with this last breath, he released his body from the constraints of earthly mind, emotion and spirit.
And now, I am back to ‘mind.’ I have so many thoughts jumping for attention. I feel like a popcorn machine in a movie theatre. Yet there is a sense of joy and anticipation in my spirit as I look forward to more writing. As I use this platform to process my own life, I hope to stimulate reciprocal reflections in you. The Na’vi people in the movie Avatar say, “I see you.” If we meet, if we are already friends, may you and I ‘see’ each other through this common experience of life and living.