Shaped by Myths, Masters, and Mystics

We live in a world shaped by stories told, retold and retold again. By the time they reach our ears they bear little familiarity with their origins. Tales that might even be based on some kernel of truth but more than likely were first envisioned in the mind of the victor to keep those vanquished in place.

We were weaned on burning bushes, celestial whispers and tablets carried down mountains to an ungrateful people who Moses found upon his descent praying to a golden calf. My father viewed the world through laboratory goggles, dressed in a white coat, beaker in hand, performing a magic show of sorts to prove or disprove. Neither view, of seas parting to protect the chosen people nor the dissection of a frog, answered the questions that beat in my heart.

With our Western culture leaving the spiritual realm chained to Samson’s pillars or nailed to Jesus’ cross, and science long ago warned off the territory beyond the veil, my hunger for answers to these questions grew.

At fifteen, I discovered between the tattered pages of a well-read book, Siddhartha sitting beside a river beneath a Bodhi tree sharing the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, among other numbered pearls, and for me the stars aligned. The words, not of lives past and future, but of consequences for our actions and the joy with which one can view the world as it is, not measured against expectations, made perfect sense.

With love and life’s fits and starts, grappling first with the loss of my father and later with losses of my own as a father, I left the path known as the Middle Way although I lived life loosely within its tenets. It’s taken years, most spent pushing Sisyphus’s burden up the hilltop, earning a living, raising our fledglings to become allies to humanity, and since your leaving, to finally see my way back to the comfort of the path.

I do not sit cloistered alone, hidden beyond an ashram’s walls. I am still of the world we walked in, but now carry a peace and love within that I am learning to share with those without.