Musings on the day

Looking out my home office window, with the sun shining and the wind moving the upper branches of the white pine trees that surround my three acres of paradise, I thought it was a whole lot warmer than it actually was.

Yesterday, it was about 60 degrees, and somehow I thought it was the same today.

I could have easily looked at the thermometer--a Christmas gift from my dear father in Vermont, which is digitally and wirelessly connected to a sensor on the back porch whose counterpart sits upon the upright piano-in-need-of-tuning in the living room and displays the inside temperature, the outside temperature and the time--and seen that it was a mere 33 degrees. But I didn’t check it as I suited up for a walk in the middle of the afternoon.

With Dodger--my hairy and sweet, soon-to-be-13-year-old retriever-chow mix of a dog--anxious at the door, I put on a hat and gloves. Good thing, because it was cold. All that is to say that sometimes our assumptions, based on what we perceive, are not always correct.

My days are spent in self-education. From gas drilling e-mail messages, which have complicated studies attached, to graduate-level discussions pertaining to whatever class I am taking (World Religions, this semester), I follow the threads left for me, at bit like Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods following a breadcrumb trail. They, and I, seem to be searching for our way back home, or maybe a route through the present and into the future that will bring us to a clarification of our place in the world.

And given this metaphor, the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, I suspect I needn't worry about the outcome of my quest. As far as I remember, they find their way out of the forest, into the light, and back to their loving father.

But wait a minute, wasn’t the original problem that their father was in the clutches of an evil step-mother? Am I working under the assumption that all fairy tales work out in the end? Could that stepmother be another metaphor for any number of post-modern-day scourges like natural gas drilling in pristine areas or corporate greed? Like the day looking like yesterday when actually it is itself in the present moment?

Whoosh, who can tell?

Not me.

Even so, today’s threads brought me the story of Cat Stevens, who abandoned stardom for allegiance to Islam. His story is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcgCdn8I8kU&NR=1

I was intrigued, as was the documentary, that the messages in the songs that Cat Stevens was singing and writing for a very long time were prophetic to his future life. Consider his hit, "Father and Son" and the constant refrain "I know I have to go away." This line mirrored his giving up his music career to become a humanitarian serving a higher purpose.

His conversion begins with an experience of swimming out beyond the waves at Malibu and realizing that the current is taking him away from shore and that he is going to drown. "Lord," he says, "If you save me, I will serve you." Just then, he relates, a wave came that pushed him shoreward and he found enough strength to swim. Standing on solid ground, he rejoined the living.

I can only hope that something like this will happen to me. Perhaps in my following of bread crumbs or email-Internet threads, I will be led to a new morning where revelation will guide me forward.

Perhaps I will meet you there.