Sitting on a bench

The current event in the UK is our second Lockdown, now in its second week. I still get out each day, walking into town and make do with a take-away coffee. The weather so far has been fair so I find a convenient bench and park myself for a while. Many others have the same idea.

Drifting off at a tangent, I realised again this morning my love of trees. Not forests, but individual trees. They are healing, at least for me. Something about the sheer chaos of their twisting branches yet all contained within an overall symmetry. A message from Reality.

OK, I'm a nut. I think of an old Peanuts cartoon, of Charlie Brown gazing up at the heavens and saying to Lucy..... "Sometimes I look up at the stars and think that just as I am down here, alone among millions of others, there is a star up there, alone, that is my star. Do you think that means anything Lucy?"

"Yes" says Lucy, "It means that you are cracking up Charlie Brown."

Well, there is a good life to be lived as a nutter, even one under the blanket.

I have been experiencing recurrent bouts of reality.

A confrontation is a complex subject.


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Confrontation


A confrontation, especially a hostel one, is a face-to-face encounter.

Reactions to the same encounter, [some more aggressive some less] tend to be similar.

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Is that correct?

Is that "hostile"? (though I've had some pretty bad encounters in hostels)

I think that we are, in a sense, co-creators of Reality. Reality is not a "given", out there, already determined and ordained by a transcendent Being, there to be recognised, acknowledged, accepted.

As I have waffled before, quoting others, we are the animals who interpret. Interpretation is what we are , not something we do.

I think this understanding can be found throughout history, in all Faiths, and is by no means "new age". Christian mystics such as St John of the Cross speak of needing to "walk in the dark" if we wish to be sure of the road ahead, Alan Watts speaks of the "wisdom of insecurity" while the Buddhists have always advocated standing upon the "firm ground of emptiness". One of my favorite mentors, Thomas Merton, steeped in awareness of, even allegiance to, Catholic monastic traditions, recognised the very same in the way of Chuang Tzu...."Chuang Tzu would have agreed with St. John of the Cross, that you enter upon this kind of way when you leave all ways and, in some sense, get lost"

So what we "encounter" is never a ready made reality. The temptation is to simply interpret according to our own bias and conditioned belief system, receiving "confirmation" and becoming more assured of our correctness even as we congeal.

I would say that we should "encounter" is always a call to freedom in each moment. Which for me requires trust/faith. It requires vulnerability.

Lucy, peppermint patty, and snoopy enter a dog show. Snoopy loses. Guess who won first and second prizes?

Wasn't charlie brown!