In this month of my 73^rd birthday, I have now exceeded the length of time that my mother lived.  She died in the middle of her 72^nd year after a very lengthy and hard battle with MS.  My son was 4 when she died, and was suddenly made aware of the fact that someday his mother would die.  In our discussions, we somehow settled upon the number 102 for the years that I would remain alive.  I doubt that I will be able to fulfill that promise, but I do not doubt that I will follow the path my father walked, and he walked his path for 90 years.

The future cannot be foretold, so I have chosen to make each year of my life count.  Mistakes? Yes, of course. Wishes that things were different? Certainly.  Joys, successes, and downright wonderful achievements? A few.  Okay, actually more than a few, and for that I am humbled and grateful.

One of the things that I am most proud of, and not coincidentally kept me going through the downtimes, is the depth at which I chose to study and embrace the tenets of Life that have guided me forward throughout my life.  And, since I started delving in deeply at the age of 16, I do mean “throughout”.

It began with reading Silent Spring and then Mohandas K. Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth. These two books changed my outlook on life and my path forward through it completely.  I began to see the world in a different light:  I started seeing the Earth.  I started to make considerations in what I did with the Earth in mind.  This was accented by a very poignant scene in Gandhi’s life story in which he refuses to drink beef broth despite being on the brink of death from illness. I became a vegetarian.

Being a vegetarian was very difficult in the Midwest in 1967. I did not do it well. And I did not stay well because of that.  I contracted Infectious Mononucleosis (the liver-destroying kind, not the “kissing disease” kind) and spent six months of my junior year of high school in isolation in my room because of it.  There were certainly downsides to this, not the least of which was my father making me eat meat as part of the “cure”.  And, afterward, I was called a fool for attempting such an out of the norm thing as vegetarianism. I went back to it, though.  I studied it well and did it better. 

The great upside of my isolation was that I had six months to do nothing but lie in bed—and read.
I read.  And then I read some more.  I was prompted to read more about the Hinduism that guided Gandhi’s life. That prompted me to read about the Buddhism which sprang from Hinduism. And then, as more spiritual pathways came into my awareness, I set out to learn everything I could through the books I could get in the little far-northwest suburb of Chicago where I lived.  A neighbor who worked at the local library brought me everything she could find, including getting books from the University Of Chicago library on my behalf.  A year later, when I was assigned the title “My Personal Beliefs on Religion” as a senior year term paper, I was sure that was why I got the assignment, but I am also sure that the teacher wanted to make my six months of confinement worth something to me.  I was well-equipped to address the topic because that exploration turned into a life-long Omnism.

I had also discovered my love of research and reading/combining various viewpoints on a topic. It made my decision to go to a liberal arts college that had a program of “collaborative and experiential learning” which allowed me to choose my own focus and program of study an easy choice.  The degree was in Liberal Arts, but the depth of the study experience was so much more.

As I have moved through my life and studied a few things, I have always followed my own best example of delving deeply into the subject(s) and maintaining the goal of learning as much as possible.  Part of my life has been as a teacher, and I have never been able to teach anything about which I didn’t feel that I had learned everything that I could. This includes, of course, living it and learning it as a way of being.

These days as my study and research is ever-present and ongoing, I have been fortunate to learn from people who have extensive knowledge and spent many years studying in their chosen field.  I love the doing of that studying.  It’s made me very happy to be retired so that all I have to do is watch the Gardens rewild and study in order to become more of my self.

I’ll just mention that I do find it (hmmm…what’s the right word? Questionable? Weird? Disturbing? ….you choose.) that so many have only taken a cursory look at something and then profess to teach it. Or, worse yet, read a book – or an online article—written by someone else who had taken a cursory look and then proclaimed themselves quite knowledgeable about the subject, and from that gone on to profess teaching a very watered down at the least and dead wrong at the most version.  Or, worse yet, changed it to make it “theirs” and thereby completely adulterating the entire thing.

This brings me to feeling very ‘old fashioned’.  Clearly displaying my age, I have always thought old fashioned meant long skirts and old cars, or even a horse and buggy.  Now, I see all too clearly that today’s old fashioned is counted against the speed of the internet and the rapidity at which ideas…some good, some bad, most just not correct…infiltrate into the mainstream of the different societies that we have.

In my specific dynamic with the world (the world, not the Earth) I see all too often that these wonderful gems of wisdom and ways of being are being dismantled and cherry-picked for convenience and for some form of success. Worse yet, they are being taught to others incompletely if not inappropriately.  All too often I read of or go to a talk/workshop/etc. by someone who has no real idea about what they are saying and doing beyond what they need it to do for their own aggrandizement.  I won’t even talk about certain things, or say certain terms anymore because I know that I will not be heard for what I am saying based upon deep study and experience, but heard in the way one person or another is listening based upon less in depth study and little or no real experience with it.  It would be foolish of me to try to express what I mean to those who have no reference point for hearing me.

We all hear things through our own filters, our own experiences, or own beliefs. But there are certain things that are just not able to be re-worked to fit the needs of an individual.  And yet, there are those who do try. To use an example that was ever-present in my life in the 1970s-1990s: “No, vegetarians do not eat fish. They do not eat chicken. They do not eat meat/fish/chicken occasionally.”  If I had a dollar for every time I had to go through that verbal dance, I would have made a lot of money from it. Sure, things are much better now and the understanding has grown exponentially. The point here is that one cannot change the basis of something to fit one’s own desires.  One cannot change the absolute definition to suit their mindset.  The same is true for a few other things.  As in, no, goat yoga and beer yoga are not really Yoga. Patanjali was extremely clear about what Yoga is.

Here’s the point: I know that I cannot stop the Neo Age from bastardizing the truth of an idea to fit the need for backup for one thing or another.  It’s been going on for too long, in too many ways, and too many directions.  I get it.  However, I will not succumb and I will not condone.  And, if that makes me foolish about how times are changing and things are different, then I accept my foolishness with honor.

_{This was inspired by re-discovering the following, which I wrote a decade ago:}

“Doing inner/spiritual work requires one to work hard
in order to push past the parameters of paradigms
that want to keep us comfortable in our habits
and want us to be complacent
and accepting of what we know to be ‘true’.
And the feeling of clarity and lightness
when that piece of work is done
is where real joy is found.
Now, on to the next lesson.” 
Kate Cowie Riley; August 4, 2014