“You go out yonder in them woods, and you sit yourself down on an old hickory stump and you be real quiet and take notice of everything around you, that’s where you find God,” my daddy said.
He paused, took a drink of his coffee. It ran over the side of his cup and pooled in the saucer, because he’d overfilled it with milk and yet, it was just about strong enough to make a spoon stand up.
He sat the cup back onto the saucer. “My momma always told me that when you’re lost in the woods, no matter where you are, you climb up on a stump or a big rock or something that lets you feel the wind, and you let it blow on you. You feel that wind ablowin’. If it’s a cold wind, don’t follow it, but if it’s a warm wind, you follow that one and it’ll lead you home.”
The Eternal Wisdom of Simple Folk
Innocent Days
I guess I was about ten years old when Daddy told me that. I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t understand it for many years. Now, I understand it. I’m not sure he understood it or even his mother, but somebody, somewhere down our family tree knew what it meant. Somehow that knowledge got started.
The beautiful piece of wisdom handed down through my paternal grandmother’s family was that home isn’t a place where you stay. It’s a place where you feel warm and welcome, a place where you are. The cold wind in the saying refers to following a direction that isn’t meant for you and the warm wind represents the spiritual knowing that comes when you follow it.
Spiritual knowing isn’t something that can be taught with words alone. It must be realized and allowed.
Spiritual Knowing is Not Simply Mental Acknowledgement
The spiritual knowing isn’t something that can be taught. It can only be experienced. It can’t be told to you, and you can’t learn about it in a book. You just have to know it personally. There is no other way.
It is the great awakening and once your eyes are open and you have seen, you can’t unsee ever again. This world takes on a different look to you. Everything around you will change, because the way you see it has changed.
There is a way that is higher than the ways that prevail in our society, or for that matter, in any society that has existed throughout human history. This way is a higher, more virtuous way and the only way that goes with us beyond the grave. Truthfully, I believe it is the only way worth living. It is the Spirit Way.
The Spirit Way says that…
I am not my body. However, I do temporarily reside in one.
I am not my job. Still, I get up and go to work.
I am not somebody’s wife, mother, sister, grandmother or friend. Yet, I carry out these roles.
I am not an artist, writer or teacher. Nevertheless, I teach, I paint, and I write.
I am not my thoughts. I have thoughts, but I’m not my thoughts.
I’m not my emotions. I experience emotions but they are not who I am.
The Spirit Way says that…
I am loved. I am appreciated. I am valued. I am content. I am peace. I am abundant. I am spirit. I am life. I am light.
I am all of these and more because who I am, who you are, is an eternal energy being from another realm having a temporary physical experience in this finite realm that people call time, space and reality.
The Dead-End Way
But “reality” isn’t what’s real. It’s just a parenthesis in the expanse of forever, kind of like going into a pocket universe. Our reality is the small pocket in true reality.
The finite physical reality has its way. That way is based in fear and in the idea that there is lack. That way leads us to believe that we must constantly seek what we don’t have in order to be complete and know contentment. That way fosters competition, mistrust, hatred, wars, and destructions of all kinds. Eventually, it leads to a dead end and none of the physical things it accumulated, or impressions made upon others can go back into the spirit realm when we cross over.
The Spirit Way leads to Freedom
The Spirit Way, also known as the Way of Virtue, is the path to freedom. The freedom comes from knowing that nothing here is lasting and that we come from something much bigger and that we have a purpose that is beyond our temporary journey. So, we come here, to experience the physical realm.
When we transition into purely non-physical states of being, we take every important thing we picked up along this road with us. We carry all the love we gave and received the moment we cross over.
I’m remembering my dad when he was passing in and out of this reality and making his transition. On his death bed he was talking about love and how it’s the only thing that matters. The ONLY thing. That’s it. Love.
The Spirit Way is the Prerequisite to Miracles
I am a spiritual being having a physical experience and not a physical being having a spiritual experience. My existence in this world is contingent upon my spirit energy remaining in my body and animating it.
When we walk in the Spirit Way it may look strange or confusing to those who are alienated from the source of their existence or as the Bible puts it, to those who are afar off from God. In other words, they choose to do things based on the conventional wisdom of whatever age and culture they live in rather than on the timeless truth of the Spirit Way. They choose to be led by the finite understanding of fellow amnesiac travelers rather than being Spirit-led.
All of us are animated by energy and that energy is Spirit. The rules of the Spiritual Reality supersede the rules of the physical reality. This is the perquisite to the miraculous. The prophet Isaiah once said that God’s ways are as high above the ways of conventional wisdom as the heavens are above the earth. You can’t understand spirit things when your radio dial is set to only receive finite signals.
The Spirit Way and the manifestations it gives birth to are one and the same. As the Apostle Paul once said, we, “call those things that be not as though they were.” We understand that the world was “not made of things which do appear.”
So having said that, I now encourage you as I seek to encourage myself to stop trying to fix it or make things happen under your own power. Give it to God and let it go.
Follow the inspirations of the Divine Spirit, but don’t do anything because you are being urged by people or seemingly threatened by circumstances.
Surrender your ego. That means stop making it all about how you come across or about your needing something from someone. Seek God’s guidance and then trust it to be there and follow it.
Let the source of all that is, the Great I Am, untangle the knots for you and watch how beautifully everything works out.
