Day 17346: Me. Here. Now

I am on a quest to find my authentic being.  These words will be in effort to describe that experience.  If you have found this little corner of the internet, "Welcome".

Prologue:

I am a sponge.  We all are; we are soaked in the things we see, the language we hear, the stories we are told, and our lived experience.  This creates our perception, and our perception is our everyday reality.

What I am trying to say is this; if we walk around wearing orange tinted glasses on a snowy day, the snow will appear orange (Ram Dass, or maybe Rupert Spira?).  Is the snow actually orange?  No, of course not, but the 'reality' of the white snow, mixed our 'perception' through orange tint certainly makes it look that way to us, and without acknowledgement of our eyewear choices, we could be fooled into thinking that snow is orange.  We would live a life in which we knew that snow was orange.

That is a simple way to say, we're all wearing tinted glasses, but most of us never realize it, or maybe even do realize it, but are too afraid to take them off because we identify with that perception of reality too closely to conceive of a life without orange tint.

Here are some of the tinted glasses that I wear:

• I am a man
• I am Canadian
• I am a father
• I am a partner
• I am a son
• I am a brother
• I am an ex-fundamentalist
• I am an ex-husband
• I am inadquate versions of all of those things above... 

I know that these are all just labels that we identify with, and sometimes so closely that we forget who we really are:

This blog is intended to be a repository of both tinted and untinted eyeglass reviews; a sort of Yelp for spirituality, as I explore the mystery of existence.

I am not overly concerned with grammar, or my excessive use of commas, or run on sentences; think stream of conciousness meets public school English and you'll be close.

I will be quoting from several teachers and their shared wisdom that I have accumulated along the way, and some of those quotes have not been vetted for absolute veracity, but I think the message is the important thing, not so much the syntax.

I will change my opinions.  I will abandon things I previously believed.  I will continue to change, because we're fucking supposed to.  I will contradict myself, and I will say the same thing multiple times.  I will be a perfectly imperfect human.

I will attempt to use humor, because I think like metaphor, and poetry, and song (and basically, all art), there are ideas and concepts that can only be fully explored through non-standard conversational text.  Also, I think I am kind of funny or, at least, I make myself laugh...quite a bit.

I will also share things that fill me with wonder.  Wonder seems to be an ingredient that has been swapped for surety and fear in our society; I never want to lose sight of the wonder that is our existence.

Let's go for a walk.

“I don't believe in magic.'
The young boy said.
The old man smiled.
'You will when you see her.”

~