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And all is well. This whole problem of attachments and problems is analagous to something Anthony Di Mello wrote a few years back. He said something to the effect that when we separate our worldly problems and go down within ourselves, we find ! that all is well. We have a real problem in that we’re stuck in trying to solve them; our problems.
The interior life is real. It just doesn’t seem that way. He told a several stories about this. One was of a farmer, who found a large egg one day and brought it back to his farm to put with his hens to hatch. When it hatched an eagle chick was the result. This chick grew and followed the hens around the barnyard, scratching for food as the hens did. One day the eagle was looking up to the sky and saw a magnificent bird wheeling and kiting through the sky. “What’s that?”, he asked. One of the other chickens said, “That’s an eagle, the king of the skies. He can do that and we can’t because we’re chickens.” The eagle watched the sky for a while and then went back to doing what the other chickens were doing. He lived and died as a chicken, never realizing what he was.
The other story dealt with waking up. Di Mello said that most of us are sleepwalking. We’re not awake. We’re dreaming. We’re not aware. We’re often having a nightmare. Wake up. The spiritual life is about awareness. The BB tells us the same thing. It says the price of sobriety is eternal vigilance.
Kathleen, the woman, who I went to counseling, when I was five years “sober”, told me that I had been sleep walking. That was the state I was in, when I was drinking. One of the walking dead. She was a spiritual guide for me and directed me into a state of wakefulness. Many along the way have had to remind me not to fall asleep again. Often I have dozed off and found myself totally unaware. Thankfully someone would always nudge me and get me back on the path.
Ours is a way that was born of a disease. Our path is laid out for us. Our bottoms were wake up calls. Our problem is that we want to stay in bed and “enjoy” our “comfort”. We don’t want to get up. We don’t want to grow up. We seek the softer and easier way. The way of the eagle on the ground.
Thomas Merton once wrote about the ocean. He said that on the surface great storms could be taking place, but in the depths there was calm and no disturbance. All is well. We have to be awake to find that all is well.
Just thinking. Hmmm. There’s that thinking again.