I have yet more thoughts floating around on the fringes of my awareness. I feel like I’m close to some dramatic breakthrough or new insight. Very close but not quite there. I feel like it has the potential to be some wild new way-outside-the-box paradigm shift some new way of seeing and being entirely. But there’s a barrier I have to push through to get there.

We’re in the midst of a blizzard so I wasn’t able to get Collin today as scheduled. Most of the roads are shut down so I have another night for quiet contemplation. It’s the perfect atmosphere, with the storm howling, the world outside all white and blustery, and in here it’s warm and quiet and peaceful. A candle’s burning softly and it’s about to get dark.

I’ve had a few little episodes of synchronicity the past few days. I was reading a Lynn Andrews book right after I had written about anxiety in my chest and she began talking about the exact same thin--how the anxiety was protecting her heart. Then yesterday and today I was reading Travels in a Stone Canoe and this one Lakota man said the following: “The material life isn’t worth living. Materialism without spirituality is the curse of this world. It’s our job as human beings to use the material in the service of the spiritual.” Matthew King

I feel like that’s the answer I needed, but what would that look like? It’s quite a stretch to call headboards spiritual. I know that beauty, the creation of beauty, can be a way of using the material world for spiritual good, but a beautiful headboard is just too much of a stretch. I had the thought that if I really need to work with my hands maybe building small altars for people to use in their homes, or even outside in their yards might be fulfilling. Just build beautiful altars and let people decorate with whatever fits their spiritual tradition or speaks to them. But that idea feels kind of contrived. It’s a mental two-plus-twoing, not something I feel in my heart is my path.

My path may be more radical than that if I can just break through this barrier that stands in my way and finally SEE. There’s a higher way of seeing--something much more all-encompassing. I sense it.

I know that the new insight will be a deepening of my thoughts about materialism and the bland dullness of modern life, the superficiality, the way we’ve cut ourselves off from what matters. Somehow, the shift I feel coming on will take into account a much broader account of humanity, going back to our roots, our origins. Who we think we are is just a whisper of who we really are.