Thanks Frank, I'm not always so gracious when given advice!
I have a feeling that everyone who reads your initial post will realise they have shared your experience, and come through it with varying degrees of success and pain. We are all on a journey, no? And I agree with you about journeys -- they focus the mind on things other than the usual trivia, and it's not always the most enjoyable ones that do us the most good, is it?
My first memory is of a journey, 3 years old, running away from home. I got about a hundred yards.
Then, a little later on, came the journey that shaped my life more than any other event --
I wasn't old enough to know I should be hurrying.
That these interruptions in my education were frowned on.
The trip down the yard, bounded on one side by the rising Victorian bulk of the school, and across the narrow space the towering wall which held back the hillside, was a voyage of discovery.
At the far end, the dim outhouse with the big metal milking-bucket that had once seen better times with the cows.
Now relieved of any distractions the return was more significant still.
It shaped the rest of my life.
I was six.
Over the top of the wall, black against the bright morning sky, brambles hung dripping in icy cascades as the sun found all the colours in the stones, ferns and moss, and brought them to shining life.
I can't remember what I thought, all those years ago, but the feeling is still with me.
It was the sort of feeling which can make you waste the rest of your days on Earth looking for God. The sort that hurts when you have it, and even more when it leaves you
The knife-edge in her voice cut me out of Paradise like skinning a fish, her small figure in the tall stone doorway almost vibrating with anger, oblivious to the beauty which seemed to me so much more vital and worth seeking ...
than everything she represented.
Teachers, authority, grown-ups, twisted hymns and gentle Jesus meek and mild, she put it all up against the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
Well, if I had to choose, I was six - but I wasn't stupid.
Neither was I any longer the child who had gone down the yard. I'd seen too much, I'd had a glimpse.
It's been the same ever since, Frank -- we all get intimations that there's more to Heaven and Earth than we ever get to understand. Some of us bury our feelings and just get on with the business of living, others, like me, face an inescapable quest. Our external wanderings mirror our internal wanderings, and it's never finished. Because we all have to find our own path, there's a limit to how useful we can be to each other -- for me, the links between Quantum Science and ancient religious philosophy, are the source of the most useful information I've come across -- but each to their own.
Some view life as an opportunity to get rich, others dance to a different tune.
I came to dance.
Sunbeem.