Holiday evening reflections (or, On being untethered in a mundane world)

The end of May draws near and in the United States it is unofficially now summer.

My job for the last nearly six years has been... uhh... well, to describe how unusual and stressful and frustrating it can be would require actual examples that no one would believe. It's not all bad, but the unbelievable and vexing parts are made worse by how unnecessary they are. So having a three day weekend is really valuable.

I would have posted something hear last week but my attention was grabbed by another mass shooting at a school in America. Once again the same well-funded political movement is blocking any meaningful changes to save lives by idolizing guns and gun violence. Once again there is a chance to put momentum into calls for reforms.

Whether heart-rending tragedies or the banal vagaries of every day life, many people have some form of reframing or re-contextualizing their experience of the world, either to try to make sense of or accept what transpires or generate and sustain motivation for change. While some will quibble over the use of spiritual as inadequate to label all such transformations in perspective, many such transformative experiences share common events such as being moved by natural beauty or music or other inspiring stimuli. Or by having one's mortality brought sharply into view for some reason.

In my last entry I referenced themes of health and wellness connected to our circumstances and how any type of spirituality, whatever its form, needs to be able to address everyday concerns as well as existential ones. The writing could use some revision but it was a quick lunchtime musing so it is a little untidy and lacking a bit in focus.

Nonetheless, it does lead to this: I never have been able to really get into or stick with any religion, sacred tradition, or anything more than an intellectual yet generic spiritual framework. As I've no doubt shared here before, I don't perceive the world around me as full of wonder and mystery and potential. It offers no sense of hidden truths or unseen depths. It's just flat. Mundane.

To use other language, no sense of the numinous. A super low score on the M-scale. A world without a soul. Neither empty nor full. Neither hot nor cold.

I like parts of Christian monasticism and a lot of the Westernized translations of Buddhism and so on, but commitment is hard when the mystique and newness wear off. I can appreciate the wisdom regarding the human condition but it's hard to not wander off and let whatever practice I had picked up lapse as there is little or no personal connection.

Some people may wonder what that means for dealing with everyday life or horrible catastrophes, but it's just like everyone else I guess only without turning to a liturgy or prayer or whatever. I guess we are all used to what we know? We all have our own ways of filtering and processing our experiences.

Sometimes I use spiritual language and gestures anyway because they are a form of expression even if you don't feel a deep belief or faith in the literal meaning of the gesture or expression, because why not? It's part of our shared human heritage. I don't mean any disrespect to those who idolize such religious forms, especially ones I have a personal connection to.

Life review and the experiences of wonder and substance

OK, that wasn't the best title.  But it is based on an interesting occurrence. 

I was just starting to re-read a favorite book, and I was struck by something that the author's description evoked.  It didn't last long, and in a few minutes has already faded and receded mostly into a foggy remnant.  But it was a sudden brief collection of a few images from my life.  Not comprehensive, just the tiniest sampling.

It included the feeling I had when in the spring of 1992 I was in an hotel room in Barcelona, the kind I could have seen at the time as the kind of place an artist or musician might rent as an apartment for a while.  Nice and spacious but relaxed, a bit faded.  There was a sense of a new way of experiencing the world.  The same is true of when I was in Manhattan for the first time in 2003.  It was as if the texture of reality, the shade of the world, could be recolored -- a hint of a different way of living and seeing things like a window into a world of art and architecture and a basic disposition to life.  Something similar could be said of the six weeks I spent in the summer of 1995 as a volunteer at an archeological dig in the south of England.  But there was more to it than just memory.