'The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.'
A quote of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, active in the early 1900s. The context was political, though the personal could be more apt, especially if applied to spiritual beliefs.
Grace as I conceive it is a state in which we are one with the world. No division, no disharmony, no searching for a place for us to fit into nature. I imagine a pre-fallen world, one in which neither Adam nor Eve bit into the apple of knowledge, and never realized they were naked and alone and afraid. Times in which we are given an opportunity to temporarily reside in that world are gifts to be cherished and held onto loosely, as it is a gift given and then taken away. Our hope is that this gift will one day be given to us forever.
But I am not concerned today with the the everlasting gift, but in the temporal state of grace we unexpectedly find in unexpected places, a vaporous and evanescent state that can slip through our fingers like tendrils of smoke. While I would love to capture this state and codify a set of easy access instructions, I know it is difficult. All I can do is create conditions ripe for grace and hope that grace manifests.
I drove out China Hat road yesterday for a training run around the Horse Butte Trailhead. The annual precipitation in Central Oregon steadily decreases the further east you travel from the Cascade mountain range, and this is strikingly evident in the vegetation. The first few miles on the trail are dominated by Juniper and Pine trees which suddenly give way to low-lying sage brush and prairie. With the sun out and the wind at my back, the air is filled with light and my spirit soars. A mid-sized butte is on my right hand side, crisscrossed with the tracks of ATVs. Gunshots ring in the distance from target practice. Another solitary runner appears, coming towards me, dog at his heel. "Great day, great day!" we congratulate each other at our good fortune to be outside on a Saturday morning. The minutes and miles slowly pile up; 20 minutes = 2 miles, 40 minutes = 4 miles, 60 minutes and it is time for a swig of water and some gummy bears. I count my steps in groups of ten, hypnotized by the exercise and the repetitive number count. I start to think in between the numbers; what exists in that space between? Counting is so rudimentary; we measure out the hours and days by numbers, and the sum of these make up our lives. 60 years, 80 years, at most 100 years. Time moves on and we with it, but what is there about the in-between time? An offshoot of Zeno's paradox: if we take the count between one and two, and divide it in half, then divide each half again into half, and so on and so forth onto infinity, have we not just shown that there is an infinity between one and two? And at times it feels like that is where Eden is, in the space between the seconds. I can't live there, but I can see it from here.
As I lay down my beats from one to ten, I overlay it with my breaths from one to four, each breath a word, each word an affirmation, a confession, a supplication, a plea.
A quote of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, active in the early 1900s. The context was political, though the personal could be more apt, especially if applied to spiritual beliefs.
Grace as I conceive it is a state in which we are one with the world. No division, no disharmony, no searching for a place for us to fit into nature. I imagine a pre-fallen world, one in which neither Adam nor Eve bit into the apple of knowledge, and never realized they were naked and alone and afraid. Times in which we are given an opportunity to temporarily reside in that world are gifts to be cherished and held onto loosely, as it is a gift given and then taken away. Our hope is that this gift will one day be given to us forever.
But I am not concerned today with the the everlasting gift, but in the temporal state of grace we unexpectedly find in unexpected places, a vaporous and evanescent state that can slip through our fingers like tendrils of smoke. While I would love to capture this state and codify a set of easy access instructions, I know it is difficult. All I can do is create conditions ripe for grace and hope that grace manifests.
I drove out China Hat road yesterday for a training run around the Horse Butte Trailhead. The annual precipitation in Central Oregon steadily decreases the further east you travel from the Cascade mountain range, and this is strikingly evident in the vegetation. The first few miles on the trail are dominated by Juniper and Pine trees which suddenly give way to low-lying sage brush and prairie. With the sun out and the wind at my back, the air is filled with light and my spirit soars. A mid-sized butte is on my right hand side, crisscrossed with the tracks of ATVs. Gunshots ring in the distance from target practice. Another solitary runner appears, coming towards me, dog at his heel. "Great day, great day!" we congratulate each other at our good fortune to be outside on a Saturday morning. The minutes and miles slowly pile up; 20 minutes = 2 miles, 40 minutes = 4 miles, 60 minutes and it is time for a swig of water and some gummy bears. I count my steps in groups of ten, hypnotized by the exercise and the repetitive number count. I start to think in between the numbers; what exists in that space between? Counting is so rudimentary; we measure out the hours and days by numbers, and the sum of these make up our lives. 60 years, 80 years, at most 100 years. Time moves on and we with it, but what is there about the in-between time? An offshoot of Zeno's paradox: if we take the count between one and two, and divide it in half, then divide each half again into half, and so on and so forth onto infinity, have we not just shown that there is an infinity between one and two? And at times it feels like that is where Eden is, in the space between the seconds. I can't live there, but I can see it from here.
As I lay down my beats from one to ten, I overlay it with my breaths from one to four, each breath a word, each word an affirmation, a confession, a supplication, a plea.
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