Awakening

Sonoran Desert at dawn.

The morning air was cool - 48 degrees fahrenheit as the darkness before dawn telegraphed a clear morning ahead. Today is Friday.

So much is happening to make each of us realize that we need another awakening - one that will break through the tendency to stay asleep so that the world of dreams might blunt the trauma of what we see as reality in our world today. It is just past Christmas, and not much peace can be found in our world. We so badly need to wake up.

Sometimes it's useful to create space for meditating - not just for 30 or 45 minutes, but for hours. Six hours of driving steadily east from the sea to the desert can be that kind of space. The road was clear, open, and smooth. You really can't ask for more when heading into southern California traffic flow. Christmas day is a great time to travel because few people are on the road, and the ease of moving from one point to the next on such a day could make you believe that southern California traffic really isn't so bad. (Of course, that would be a wrongheaded belief.).

The reward at the end of a journey like this is the friends who await with warmth and genuine happiness about receiving us. As always, the conversation is at once fun and serious - lightly touching on all the subjects of the day and a few topics that linger: the recent shooting of a chief executive of a health insurance company, the impeachment of the president of South Korea, the ongoing news of bombings by the IDF and the newest topics that our incoming president will be seeking to "take back" the Panama Canal and annex the country of Greenland (and possibly Canada and Mexico, too). It all seems like a nightmare/dream/delusion of the highest order! When will we wake up?

That's the question: When we we wake up to the fact that we don't have time to waste, that conflicts and violence will never solve the problems humanity is facing today, and that what really works is recognizing ourselves in relation to others, strangers and friends. We have seen the enemy and they are us, to borrow a quote from "Pogo" - who modified the sentiment from the original by Oliver Hazard Perry during the War of 1812 ("We have seen the enemy and they are ours.").

Walking before the sun rises in open, undeveloped, and natural spaces allows for clarity to be experienced. What is right and wrong in human terms, is revealed as folly in nature. There is no right or wrong. There is only what is. The vast open spaces that hold plant and animal life, the limitless skies that constantly change as the sun rises, the peacefulness that comes only when a person sees exactly where they stand in relation to all that exists. There is an awakening in such moments, a gift from the heavens.