It seems to me, in this time and space, that one must choose things that are important. An example, solitude. In the swirl of noise almost constantly surrounding us, I'm thinking we have to decide to move towards it - to choose it. In the end, solitude may do the choosing for us, but it is very patient…waiting for us to choose it. It seems that our world is bent on noise, noise organized and noise unorganized…but really anything that will keep us moving toward something or away from something else. To stop, to choose quiet, in fact seems to require a conscious choice. Otherwise, it feels like a nearly constant scream of ‘hey, look at me’, ‘notice what I am doing’, ‘look what’s on’, ‘listen to me’, ‘watch me’, ‘go here’, ‘go there’, ‘do this’, ‘do that’…is all around us, surrounding us. In one of the gaps it can’t fully fill in, we have to ask what we are trying to avoid by filling ourselves up so much with stuff, with activity, with constancy? …why? with more than ever to do, more than ever to consume, do we actually hear and feel the phrase, ‘I’m bored.’
Perhaps we are looking for something; something we can’t find in the places we are looking, something that we’re being told is ‘over here’, when really it is ‘over there’…looking for something ‘outside ourselves’ that is really ‘inside ourselves’, something that is man-made, rather than something not made by man.
Go sit in the woods for 2 hours and watch what happens to yourself internally. Notice the battle that emerges in your mind in the first hour, but gut it out…and then notice what is emerging in your spirit. Tempted to consider that perhaps noise is selling us something more than toxic? Turn it off, get away from it, be quiet. Take the long walk you need. Take a long trip into nature. Notice, for one thing, that it’s not selling you anything (this is a wonderful place to be, all by itself)…it just exists and quietly points to something…not trying to get you to notice, just waiting until you do.
Nourishment. What in our time and space actually comes anywhere near this word, this idea? Nearly nothing…seeks nourishment, nearly everything seeks consumption and the craving to move on to the next thing. If you don’t believe me now, call me in 20 years when the lack of nourishment has left nothing but the brown and worn husk of empty being.
Nature seeks to nourish you; God does really, through it. Allow it...by choosing it. You will be choosing a lot more than you realize.
