happy nothing new under the sun year!

After a few decades of living, one can see more clearly what lasts.
O, one has heard the platitudes and the beatitudes and all the other tudes along the way, but they mean nothing until one walks the journey, the pilgrim path we are all on. The stations of the cross where you wind up crucified despite your best intent and everything you have ever cherished and loved nailed right up there too as you move on to your next resurrection helpless in your own incarnation.

After one has been yanked through a knothole a few times, one learns that what lasts is a certain temperament of the heart. One can go bitter, but that is to no avail. Other folk just won't tolerate it and neither will one's own soul. Withering like a thorny bush in a dry wind, one winds up being tied in a chair and stuck over in a corner. One has consigned oneself to hell.

Nope. The temperament of heart that lasts is merriment, laughter, joy. Seeing the humor of the situation.

As is my wont, I arose after about four hours sleep to this new calendar year (I had already celebrated the new year with the planetary turnings at solstice rather than wait around for the human-made calendar to acknowledge the event) and acknowledged newness once again.

I sat in the quietness of this morning and read the book of Ecclesiastes. It called to be read with no forethought on my part. I read about how all is in vain. For some reason or no reason at all, I find that cheering. The food, the sex, the money, the empire building, the knowledge, the reputation, the botox, the clothes, the house, the strut, the fret -- they all mean and are nothing. Each one of us eventually goes to "the long house." We return to the dust from which we came. We are genetic assemblies called together for a meeting that eventually adjourns.

Color me weird but that just cheers me no end. What greater wonderment than to come into being as a companion to the sun, live out one's days and disappear -- in the natural rhythm of the universe -- an alive aware portion of the universe itself -- of God godding if you will.

And as the book of Ecclesiastes points out in its final chapter, the body is dissolving (which is humorous in itself -- I heard someone say once that there was more of them placed on the bedside table than there was in the bed), and "then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." Or as Rumi puts it -- "Whoever brought me here will have to take me home!"

What a journey it has been so far! Stripped clean of everything but the essentials -- a merry heart and an open spirit. And even those are gifts from the Source. What wonder!