A Clear, New Day

As I set out for my destination, that mythical place called Tirwana, that
spreads out expansively without end once entered, I gathered what I thought I needed for my journey and left much worry and frustration behind.

Not to belittle the months of worry, really even more of it than that—it stretched back years and years, paving a broad, hard, heavy, flattened road all the way back through my life, a road a little too barren for my tastes. And yet I had lived there, stayed there all the same for all this time up until now.

The first thing I noticed that midday as I stepped away from my home as I knew it was the absolute beauty of the day. The leaves were not recently formed on the trees, yet they showed themselves as new shoots of young green, alive with fluorescence as they clothed the trees in what would become their mature form later in the season. I wish I could say that I set out early, early morning, with the dawn a crisp, new event, but as a truth-teller, I must say that I had delayed for no reason that lent weight to the delay itself.

I do believe that some of us start late in life, or at least delay sometimes without end, the voluminous learning so available to us all. In some ways, though I had always valued wisdom and had an unusual share of it when still quite young, I certainly put off receiving the bounty of this full, rich life. But then again, I can look around and see so many people not starting out on the path at all.

And so I did set out, feeling myself prepared with what I thought I needed and deciding not to think about anything that I did not have at the ready. For this very real journey, I decided not to carry along any of that excess weight, in case it steered me off my true path. And I decided to trust.

Because this one journey is the one, the only one, that can only go right.
 

We’ve all heard and read and seen spiritual blandisms, and have possibly even lived out a few of them, but as we know deep in our own hearts, truth is writ large across everything we do and all that is. There’s so much more to be found than just the small granules of truth parceled out to us in our spare moments, if we even take the time to pay that much attention. What we really can do is find that spiritual space where all is glorious, where all life has meaning, and where all things, souls included, have connection without end.

I set out to find this glorious space and to leave behind all the distractions and treacheries of this life of ours along the way. And it would be nice to see a few good people crossing the same path in the quiet hours.

Not being a seasoned tracker of anything physical, and having gone on far fewer hikes or even walks than I would care to admit of late, I wasn’t quite sure where the path started or what it looked like. Aside from the astonishing beauty floating all through the air, I at first saw only my everyday surroundings.

I stepped outside my front door and locked it from habit before thinking better of it. Realizing that I was starting anew in all ways, I unlocked it so it would be open for whoever might need it or whatever might enter.

In front of me was my too-busy street, with cars racing up to a quick, screeching halt at the stoplight. Diesel fumes and the smell of burnt hydraulic brakes from the big trucks wafted through the air in small but distinct drafts. Some drivers would always be courteous, and only in front of them could I pull out of my own driveway onto the jammed street.

But others were all too dependably rude, aggression being the order of the day. And all too constant was the supply of drivers who liked leaning on their horns, big truck drivers included, satisfied to be creating noisy discontent with or without provocation. And they were none too caring about their intrusion into the living rooms lining the street. The road too traveled, to be sure.

I looked up and down the street, fairly hapless, and decided pretty coolly that towards the pond was more likely the way to go than towards the highway. And as I reached the oval patch of water, rippled with the faint suggestion of a breeze, I felt a soft knowing, a somehow familiar recognition and realized that if I looked just askance, I could see quite clearly the beginning of a path just ahead of me.

Like the shimmer of heat on the hottest summer day, it was something I would not be able to see straight on, but only from the corners of my eyes, the edges of my mind registering energies normally unseen.

And the beginning of this path was hardly some rose-covered archway or magic portal. We did love this pond in our town near the city, and so we successfully kept it free of litter and garbage most of the time. But even with the grass green and the ground covered with small twigs and violets, natural beauty rising up from the earth, the air felt heavy with the draglines of our culture—lacking quietude, too busy, driven in circles by rampant egoism, whipped into a froth by raging consumerism.

Everything we do and live by wholly welcomes in the stress with which we do not want to part. Through this everyday muck, the path was hard to see but was most certainly there all the same.

Enough about me for the moment. What of the air around me? What was happening in this world that we live in? And what did I, or what do any of us, understand about it?

The answer to these questions, as we all know, is endless, a conversation amongst countless people in many times, without finite boundaries. And as vast and unconfinable as the subject is, we all know it well.

At the very entrance to the path, the air itself, as I could see through squinting eyes in the layer just beyond the shimmering, revealed a sparkling purity surprising to behold. The trees themselves were more present when not viewed through the thick film we are so used to. The leaves and grass and flowers were breathing into the air and giving it the quality of being high with pure oxygen, which I am sure most of us have not felt since we were small children.

In this air, my eyes felt fresh and truly capable of seeing, and my lungs breathed deeply of real air, the kind I felt I had been missing. As the breeze picked up ever so slightly, my hair flew a little around my face, and I forgot my usual adult restraint. I threw up my arms and whirled like a young child, just the way I used to jump into piles of raked-up leaves.

The air there was truly sweet.

As a siren broke through the quiet that I could see ahead but was not yet insulated by, I realized that some car had once again slammed into another one, and the trusty guys in uniform were speeding down my street to their rescue. Though I was gazing into a space both super-real and much desired, my feet were firmly anchored in the here and now of our time, in the dangerous world of things sometimes gone awry and not quite corrected by the perfection that infuses it all.

And more troubling yet, beyond this overly hurried street I lived on, were assaults and crimes that felt like a return to barbarities not known before. Events both local and national weighed on families and the masses alike, and the mean-heartedness of crimes against individuals, whether unknown, faceless strangers or small children, was all too lively. A great sadness permeated the air and became unshakable. Where this baseness came from wasn’t exactly clear, and we were not sure whether we had participated somehow in letting it germinate and grow.

I can say that I was brokenhearted then by many things and in many ways, and I can say that it wasn’t quite my heart anymore, and that I wasn’t quite me anymore. Wanting to shed this energy drain that had not been mine to begin with, I stepped forward between a few, tall, protective trees and felt through the soles of my feet that I was happily, joyfully, at last on the first step of my path.