I love to hike and I do so as often as I can, weather permitting. This can mean four times a week during moderate temps. In the past, I went even more often. There is something very important to be gained by spending time in Nature and my soul requires it. My fourteen year old dog accompanies me and I get so many compliments on her from other hikers. They say “She’s so cute” or “She’s so happy”. Lola’s tail is always wagging and she’s friendly to children and everyone knows it just by looking at her. She’s usually too busy having fun to pay much attention back to the people interested in her, which might be part of her appeal.
But the other thing that brings such amazement to her fan club is that she is frequently carrying a stick. When she does it, it is with great purpose and strength. She carries it high and it is often too big in scale to her 30-pound size. And she’ll carry it far. If that doesn’t wear her out (and it doesn’t) what does wear her out is she eventually buries it and that is really hard work. She has to find the right spot — which is a challenge — and then she digs and covers it up using her snout to push her freshly dug dirt back up over the stick. After she’s finished she’ll find a new stick to carry and repeat the process, sometimes carrying and burying as many as five sticks on one hike. A comment I often hear is “The stick’s as big as she is.” People really go ga-ga over the sight of her with her sticks and like to talk about it. I often respond with “It’s her calling” or “It’s her purpose in life.” And it is by all indications.
Normally, I’m pretty light hearted and happy but for a few days lately I’ve had a mini dark night of the soul. Which made me think how Lola’s “purpose in life” is so absurd, so useless, so unimportant to the rest of the world. Though undoubtedly, it’s super important to her and makes her happy, which is all that matters, I suppose. You know where this thought is headed, of course, I must compare it to my own life and everyone else’s… are we any different? Does what we do matter? One of the sticks I carry is that I am compelled to produce art, but my art is on basement shelves, not in museums. Why are we driven to pursue the things we do? As a spiritual seeker I always remind myself of how Saint Francis of Assisi misinterpreted the voice in the little church that told him to rebuild the church, and so he started carrying rocks to its foundation to literally rebuild it. Don’t look for a “sign” because you’ll probably misinterpret it. Do what makes you happy. Do what makes others happy. Which is what Lola does. And she truly has made many, many persons happy just by the sight of her cuteness carrying these big sticks around as if it has some great purpose while anyone who sees it can quickly assess that there is no great purpose to what she is doing. Which is exactly why it’s so cute.
Another example that haunts me comes from Saint Thomas Aquinas. On the feast of St. Nicholas [in 1273, Aquinas] was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished. To Brother Reginald’s (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.” After which he died a few months later leaving us in suspense and studying his life’s works that he told us were straw.
The podcasts I listen to are getting crazier and crazier about the structure of this world, the powers behind what we are witnessing unfold on our planet, ancient archeology, UFO disclosure, endless war even though war is never what the people want, a future with AI, robotics, and cryptocurrency, ongoing ecological problems, lack of real human connections, fear-driven agendas, ongoing corruption, disinformation everywhere so no one knows what is true, a coming “shift”, the ongoing question of free will, society’s religion of materialistic science, the role consciousness and co-creation plays, and finally, an understanding that for a yet unresolved reason this is not really real but an illusion.
So. What actually matters? Is Lola’s life our model?
One Seeker's Story 