In a reponse to Joe's thoughts, Ray cites a poem from the Pueblo. The last
four lines touched me deeply:
"When life becomes too hard here
My people can fly away to see
How small the earth really is.
Then they can laugh and come back home again."
Many of us are fortunate from time to time: we intuit the enormity of
existence through a shiver along our spines induced by Vision. In the
first instance, it may be eyesight--a paper wrapper blowing along; a mesa
in the gloaming; an elderly human statue attached to a pathside bench; the
view of Saturn appearing from behind our Moon.
And in the second instance, our intuition shuttles us to paradox: our
smallness upon this earth. For some of us Americans, we fall off the cliff
where rationality comes to an unforeseen end, and give ourselves over to a
healthy, smiling insanity--albeit f or just a moment.
During that moment we "can laugh" at our smallness, at how serious we have
been taking the Call-of-The-Mind-Alone. Here, in a pause between
existences, we may smile without wits at what we have become, what we have
made of ourselves. And if we are lucky, we come home again with the shiver
of memory. Sometimes we give expression, as on this list, to these mindful
journeys of the Spirit beyond such words as would tempt explanation.
And also, sometimes, an individual may not return from this flight away,
because in her eyes there is no place to land, no place to come back to.
How do we open the heart to have it be Home again?
--Barry Mallis bmallis@markem.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>