It’s about this time of year, each year, that I get stuck. It’s not the cold so much, although it is cold, and it’s not even the snow, although goodness knows we have snow, it is rather a stuckness in my being. Christmas is past and Lenten meditations not yet here. I need some leverage to get myself out of the drift.
I can only imagine what St. Francis, Mediterranean mystic that he is, must think of our garden at the moment. He does not look happy. I understand. Although digging him out won’t accomplish much as there’s more snow predicted. And besides, foul or fair, he watches over this corner of our lives.
If it were Lent, I’d have some focus, a boundary for my wandering, unfocused mind. But Lent, alas, is still weeks away. And so, turning to well-stocked bookcases, I found and pulled from the shelf, Mysticism after Modernity by Don Cupitt who was Dean of Emmanuel College Cambridge. I’ve never read it, bought in at Borders, Overland Park, sometime after 1999 when I moved here. But it’s been waiting for me.
In the Introduction (yes, right away I began underlining sentences!) he writes about the “postmodern” age we live in. “In the past, all of people’s ideas about reality and objectivity – their sense of life’s basic shape – depended ultimately upon the authority of a deeply ingrained sense of religious law, and proximately upon a framework of shared philosophical assumptions. In modernity these assumptions especially concerned the human subject, consciousness, experience, reason, and language. But in postmodern times they have all broken down. Metaphysical realism has come to an end, and our whole world-view has become very much more pluralized, pragmatic, free-floating, and maintained by continual bricolage, or improvisation.”
i.e.: I’m not the only one floating around boundary-less. If we have lost the imposed boundaries of organized religion, what do we improvise with?
However, now I have a focus, a book, ideas to ponder, and way forward. Most of my life, actually, when I’m foundering and looking for a way forward, I’ve turned to books.
What helps you move forward – not just the every day forward, to-do lists will serve for that, but the forward that feeds your spirit with focus? Books? Music? Painting?
What feeds your soul? What removes you from the drift and self-imposes a boundary?
janetsunderland.com 
February is for the birds! When I feel the winter doldrums threatening to enshroud my sense of hope, I sit at my kitchen table with a cup of cinnamon-ginger tea and watch the birds.
I remember that I used to fly, too.
I recall how my focus was the daily pursuit of food.
And I am humbled by how well I have trained “my” birds to count on my whistle to signal fresh seed, suet and fruit.
All of life is interdependent. God made it that way. So, it’s okay.
What a lovely comment Valorie. Thank you!
diana read,the blessed mother appears to a woman in baltimore. one of her messages was she wanted us to talk to each other, and engage strangers in simple fellow ship. in the seth books it says god’s favorite prayer is acts of creativity. so these are my ceremonies in a modern world. boundaries fall in place naturally in the pursuit of doing things well. so say i
And well said. Thanks, Willy.
Frequently you do! Feb. has always been a struggle for me, at any rate most of my adult life–I’ve never known why.
Thanks, Judy. We may be in good and wide company!