Echoes in the night......

Scouting activities have been a large part of my family's life, as our sons grew up and their father took on various roles within the scouting organization. I have sewn on countless patches and merit badges, dropped boys off at camp and waited for them to come home from trips, worried about them in cold or rainy weather and felt a deep and enduring pride in their achievements. This weekend the scouts are having their camporee amongst the Indian mounds in Moundville. My husband went there straight from work, and my younger son drove home from college to attend. For convoluted vehicular logistical reasons, I drove him down to Moundville to drop him off. If you have visited the park in daytime, with few people there, you may have felt what I feel - the presence of a vanished people whose reverence for the place is almost palpable. It's hard to get that feeling when the park is crowded and noisy and bright. Tonight, it was already dark by the time we got there. We were driving very slowly around the mounds, watching for stray young boys in the road, and looking for familiar campsites. We finally found the one my son was looking for, and I waited in the car for him to find his friends and come back for his gear. I sat in the dark, and saw the glow of campsites set up, listened to boys running and playing and calling to each other, watched groups of boys and their leaders walking by in groups and singly, heading for the big campfire around the next bend. It aroused a curious blend of feelings - close your eyes and imagine these people are the original inhabitants, readying for a celebration, letting the young ones burn off some energy in their running and chasing games. The night air is crisp and cool, the moon is bright, the laughter of Indian children was surely the same as ours - a magical night when time loops upon itself to catch all the echoes of youth, to save and savor and add to the riches of memory.

Turn the question around -

I came across the material below in an article posted on The Geranium Farm website. It has really intrigued me, and I need to think about it some more, so I'm storing the stuff I really want to think about here so I can find it easily. What really catches me is "We are not human beings whose goal is a spiritual experience, some euphoric panacea. Rather are we spiritual beings whose vocation is a human experience,that is, to awaken our spirits and become ourselves, and to assume the stewardship for which we are created." In an earlier post (The Island Keeps Washing Away) I said that I desperately want to believe in a spiritual life after death, in which we find out why we had to go through the experience of a human life - what are we supposed to learn? I have to think about this some more - I think a part of the answer is in here.


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This piece is by the Rev. Lane Denson, featured in the "A Few Good Writers" section of http://www.geraniumfarm.org/. Lane is so gifted that these bons mots come regularly - and occasionally I fall behind in posting them. This one is simply entitled Addiction - a single word that encompasses a life turn around, a new outlook, a new way of behaving, a necessary way to learn responsibility. Thank you Lane, for your work and genius on behalf of those dealing with addiction and those who have not yet admitted that their life has become unmanageable!

We are not human beings whose goal is a spiritual experience, some euphoric panacea. Rather are we spiritual beings whose vocation is a human experience, that is, to awaken our spirits and become ourselves, and to assume the stewardship for which we are created.

May's definition of addiction as any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human spirit or desire strikes at the heart of what it means to be human, which is to be free to choose: to love, to create, to reason, and to live in harmony with all of creation and with the awesome mystery of why we are here in this life at all. The practice of addiction compromises that freedom. I've never met a human being who doesn't want that freedom by whatever name, and I've never met a practicing addict who has it.

Once again, perhaps few practicing addicts have ever considered the possibility that we are not human beings whose vocation is to a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings whose vocation is to a human experience, and that this is what is meant by the twelfth step's assurance of a "spiritual awakening" as both the goal and the evidence of recovery. The test of that renewed spirit reveals a release and return to precisely what addiction has enslaved -- the ability to live an enhanced life, a heightened capacity for the truth about oneself, to love and accept love, and to experience the courage to be together with a sense of one's own humor and that of others, as well. We speak of "recovering" but don't often name what it is we're in the process of recovering. It should be clear by now that it is our humanity, our human being, that's what."