A combination of photography and photo art with a little bit of life thrown in.
I wasn’t going to post today – but I just have to show these photos. The late afternoon sun was shining through our stained glass window onto a vase of daffodils. Oh my gosh, the colors, the shadows . Yellow daffodils become orange! Just enjoy them. If you click on any of the photos, it makes them bigger.
This is an excerpt from Moments, the second in the series. The other day I blogged about A Moment of Transcendence at Fort Bowie, Arizona. Today I’m blogging about Revelation. My series of moments are not in chronological order. This one is from college, 1964. That 1964 is 46 years ago seems impossible, but I’ve never forgotten the feeling I had from this experience.
This introduction applies to all the Moments: How many special moments do we get in a lifetime? I mean the truly magic moments that stop us in our tracks to marvel, that imbue a sense of awe that we remember forever after. On this Friday the 13th, 2009, a beautiful Spring day, it seems like a good idea to recall those moments if for no other reason than to remember.
This is a journey for the meaning of life. I think we all grapple with this at one time or another, and for some of us it seems harder to come to peace with this quest. For me personally, it was a journey that started perhaps in junior high school, intensified in my senior year of high school, and just about broke me down in college. I wasn’t raised in a religious home and I was intensely curious about God – first and foremost, was there a God. This contributed to the complexity of my quest. It went like this:
A freshman at University of California, Santa Barbara, I was majoring in philosophy. As students do, I was searching for the meaning of life, the big picture. I was desperately unhappy, which compounded, or was perhaps caused by, the search for meaning. My work habits were spotty – I studied best at night and stayed up very late. I didn’t fit in with the other kids in my residence hall – I was quirkier, liked solitude, and was drawn to more complicated people – and I wasn’t finding any. Now I realize what an arrogant thought that was, but I was a Democrat in a suite of four intense, conservative Goldwater Girls and so very out of place. My best friend was the vending machine with Hostess Fruit Pies and Paydays.
In a period of solitude, intense reading, many sleepless nights, and constant thinking that had my head spinning, I had a flash. A moment that one could perhaps call mystical. My thoughts were colored by sleep deprivation and had forced me into a meditative state. And there it was – a glimpse of the meaning of life, a picture of the whole, and I was in what I would now call a state of grace. Whatever the universe was composed of, I was one with it. I was both apart from it and part of it. It was in me and around me.
I couldn’t hold on to the state of grace and the clarification, but I did remember the revelation – life was about nothing except living. Here we were, it didn’t matter why, so the thing to do was live as if it mattered, live a good life, and have fun. Yes, fun. Learn, do no harm, and have fun. It didn’t matter if there was a God or not because that would not affect the manner in which we should live. This was both a simplistic solution to the quest but also a very profound one.
I wish I could say that I lived a less troubled life from then on but I didn’t. What I didn’t know until decades later was that I was actually clinically depressed for most of my 20s and 30s, but that is another story. I’ll just say that it’s hard to fight a battle when you don’t know who the enemy is. Eventually, I thought hard enough and lived long enough to return to that night of revelation – that was indeed all I needed to know to live a productive, satisfied life. It’s a relief to stop wondering about the meaning of life, about the existence of God, and all those intangibles that we won’t know until much later if at all. It just doesn’t matter. We’re here.
