Beauty in the madness

Beauty in the Madness

Copyright 2016 Don Ray

On a recent sunrise contemplative walk, I experienced a most curious peaceful insight.  It arose in part in response to a recent afternoon spent at an acquaintance’s house where he had me watch innumerable old video clips of war in its innumerable forms, documentary video clips, movie excerpts, compilations, technology of weaponry, cavalry charges, black and white movies with handsome heroes charging into a wall of spears or a hail of bullets, etc., etc., a compendium of testimony to the madness of the human condition.

Life Adrift or Navigating Life

Life Adrift or Navigating Life

Copyright 2016 Don Ray

As we go through life the shallow waters of a familiar lagoon seem safe and pretty and warm.

How terrifying are the deep waters!  How dark and cold!....worst of all, how unknown! 

The shallow waters, their enticing hues, their warmth, their brightness, their clarity, entice us to stay close to shore, preventing our leaving for any other shore, precluding our exploring that which could expand our horizons.

It is usually only hunger, need, and desperation that drive us to leave the warm, shallow waters and set sail across the dark and deep…..

….and of course sometimes the occasional storm, the crisis, the disaster, tossing us out of our familiar harbors and bays, marooning us in uncharted emptiness, forcing us to choose our direction.

Heaven With a Little Help From Me Friends

Copyright 2016 Don Ray 

DrDonRay@HotMail.com

Joe Cocker, dead?!  That is of course preposterous.  Surely it is time to dispel this cruel illusion of death.

Joe Cocker is dead?  How ludicrous.  How can anyone watch that performance at Woodstock and for an instant think the vitality of that individual consciousness no longer exists?  Ludicrous I say.

But wait!  Joe Cocker in the same Heaven as my Southern Baptist mother?!  Now there’s a logical incongruity! 

In the lessons learned from this temporal world have I learned anything to resolve this incongruity?