A Spiritual Life Inside the Maelstrom? Dialing 9/11 and Accepting the Invitation to Choose

When we let others choose for us, we need to know that choice will keep us safe or at least make an investment in our present goodness. It's going to be some time before we get to vote again in America for any palpable hope for collective change. So today I'm taking some warm advice from Charles Blow who writes, "...give a bit more space for the activities that celebrate the creative imagination and that express the long tumultuous span of the human condition." 

This same bid for sanity is as well the very heart and soul of the yoga called "Rajanaka." No astral tales of wistful enlightenment or claims of an ennobled exemption from our human situation. No strategies promising soporific peace. Instead an invitation to the conversation welcoming the bounty of mortality as the ostensible gift we can all share. I am ravenous for the real, for the colorable world of many colors. What do you want? Ask yourself that, not to become the follower of any "path" but instead to find your own heart and to choose for yourself what you want from life.

But do choose. Choose a way to live in these troubled times that does you and the world some honest good. Remember how choice is a human privilege we must not diminish or imprison in fear or anger or ideology. We must make choices that can shape shared futures, not merely our own. What risks are worth such a gambit? That being human _together_ is indeed our best hope? Find a way for yourself to celebrate that human condition, no matter what more you want. That's a plan we can all measure and practice without taking anything that isn't on offer to everyone. Apologies that this little sermon turned up on Monday. But today is Monday, September 11th.