Brian’s Reflection: Friday, January 13, 2012

It began in mystery and it will end in mystery,
but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between.

Diane Ackerman


The Mystery before and after is indeed intriguing. But I have to confess that they have not interested me very much. Thoughts about them are fascinating of course ….. because human beings and the human imagination are fascinating. All the way through reading Joseph Campbell’s tomes on mythology I kept thinking, “How amazing human beings are that they can think up these things!”

“A rare and beautiful country”. I’ve logged those words as the title of a poem I will eventually write. I have never been much interested in “where I came from” or “where I am going”. The Past, and Heaven, hold little attraction. I seem to have sensed somewhere along the way that this “Rare and Beautiful Country” is the test for everything else. I sense that if we don’t take this part of the Journey with utter seriousness, both the Past and the Future are meaningless. To put it another way, if we don’t learn Love here, the Past will have been useless and the future empty.

Each morning, at this time of the year on the beautiful Central Coast of California where we have been privileged to live for 4 years, I awake in the dark and look west towards the Pacific. I see Canis Minor still above the horizon, sitting on top of the Winter Triangle, and the constellation of Cancer above it, and the Sickle above it. Every single morning I am struck dumb with the glory and beauty and wonder and Mystery of the Universe ….. and of my own Life. And yours.

We live in a Rare and Beautiful Country, physically and spiritually. As much as we disfigure it, its beauty and rarity at the heart are not destroyed. It will survive and endure until the human race honours it again ….. and then it will flower with the kind of beauty that only something deprived of nourishment for a long period and then showered can do.

Actually, the flowering exists in my own being ….. for which I am deeply grateful. Each day I am aware of how I have been blessed by Love and Friendship and Adventure. And if I have a “daily prayer”, it is that this flowering be in every human soul.

Just think what a “Rare and Beautiful Country” the World would then be!

Brian+