Chop wood, carry water.

Wherever you are, there you are (’60s bumper sticker?)

I should be suspicious of what I want (Rumi via C Barks)

We live in a culture obsessed with direction and choice. Minimal if any value is placed on being present, introspective and contemplative. Your authenticity draws folks, Carl. It’s a rare gift for which I am grateful.

There was a time when my desire would have caused terrible angst but only because I didn’t recognize what my desire really was. I only felt that I wanted everything, and knowing I could not have it registered in my soul as a deeply tragic and unfair loss. So many roads untaken…

But then God found me and whispered to my soul that my desire for everything was really my desire for Him.

Now my desire is one that seeks to look where before it would have consumed (thank you Simone Weil for that beautiful clarity). Rather than angst for the road not taken, I find, like you, gratitude for them and a great anticipation for the roads I will travel, whatever they may be.

Vocationally, I don’t experience the road not taken angst because I retraced several forks in the road and trod some rather diverse paths. I spent a couple of years in grad school researching my boyhood passion of understanding the physiological & psychological precursors of behavior, focusing on bird neuroendocrinology (for example, why they migrate now north, then south). I’m so extremely introverted, rather than pursue a teaching assistantship, I took a job caring for a sugarcane greenhouse. I loved my life in the field mist-netting my birds (research objects), in the lab, in the library & the greenhouse, but life’s inevitable financial exigencies converged on me such that, curiously, at the urging of a friend in my charismatic prayer group, I began selling real estate during a local boom period. There I learned that I was sociable, interacting with one customer at a time, even if not social, not one who thrived in groups. My bird research became less important and suffered from increasing inattentiveness & a dearly loved member of my grad committee died & I left school with most of my hours but without my degree. Fast-forwarding, I married and raised 4 beautiful children & retired 9 years ago this month at age 46. This early retirement was facilitated by a bank consultant who came off an Ignatian retreat & asked me if I wanted to buy a troubled financial institution & run it. I had been a bank president a couple of times but only because opportunities came up to run shops in a conservator mode as they were on the brink of failure. In other words, I was but an alter-ego of the regulators and didn’t have an entrepreneurial bone in my body, much less money to invest. My fellow investors said not to worry, my investment would be via stock options. In a few years, we had turned the bank around, grown it modestly and I looked for a larger shop to buy us, taking extra time to ensure it was a bank from out of state who would keep all the employees. I must live frugally but we are comfortable enough. Should we hit any rough patches, I’ve resolved to find caretaker’s work in a greenhouse before re-entering the world of business. I’ve not been seriously tempted to pursue any advanced degrees.

What I do is stay home and pursue my lifelong passion of formative spirituality & contemplative spirituality, interreligious dialogue and the science & religion interface. I’ve been immersed in Thomas Merton & Richard Rohr & similar writings. And I have started writing, which is where my road not taken comes in. As an enneagram 5 and Myers-Briggs INTP, I deal with and then share impersonal ideas and theories and abstractions, with philosophy, metaphysics and theology, as it relates to spirituality, to be sure. I have not shared personal narratives, practical approaches or faith-sharing stories, which is what most people hunger for and how most process reality. When I have been an interloper on this or that forum, my type of sharing has mostly induced glazed-over eyes and befuddled heads. Eventually, I got in touch with this dynamic and decided to blog rather than enter forums, which are not really interested or nourished by my particular passion and peculiar & idiosyncratic writing style. On occasion, I say something that resonates with one or another soul and I take comfort in the thought that my small cyberniche is where and how I’ve been called. Perhaps I minister to the few who minister to the many. Perhaps not. I’m in manufacturing, I tell myself. Not marketing.

But I have pretty much exhausted my interest in my theoretical pursuits and have resolved to turn my attention to the more practical and even the more personal. So, yesterday, for the first time, I decided to share publicly what many, many years ago I had only shared anonymously on a friend’s website, I suppose partly out of integrity and stepping out in a new-found vulnerability and also to honor his memory as he is recently deceased. This sharing describes experiences, not gifted during my more contemplative post-retirement life, that were consolations received in the midst of a very difficult daily grind:
A Journeyer

This seems like a safe and welcoming place, like a real anam chara.

I don’t know that I could eat bugs, after all, I’m a vegan. But an inner city garden sounds really cool.