Ever Renewing Journey

I've been hacked! As a result I have had malicious code injected into my former blog entitled Hawkscry which caused a warning to come up for visitors to the blog. It was suggested that I take down the blog, all 390 posts! It certainly was a lesson on impermanence for me. In some ways I came to see all those varied posts as in some way an extension of myself. A person reading the blog certainly would have had a fairly good idea about what I considered important. There were also a number of personal reflections on the blog. That journey seems to have disappeared into some dark cyber woods. All gone!

As I grow older I can see there are other things that seem to be on the way out. My eyesight, once very keen, has become somewhat blurred with cataracts and I can no longer drive safely at night. On hikes I feel increasing discomfort in the joints, particularly the left hip. My memory requires more props and often I draw blanks where one I made keen connections. It is all slowly fading into what will surely be nothingness.

And yet I am compelled by some desire to keep on trying; to keep stumbling toward some sort balance, to keep observing the passing of my life and the lives around me and to try to learn what I can from the experience. In a poem I wrote I called it "falling toward heaven" Believing as I do that there is some kind of journey that the soul is on and that the journey takes us through many incarnations, it makes sense to me to try to "learn" from my present experience as a way of decreasing not only my suffering (and the suffering of those around me) in this life, but also in lives to come. 

What is the force behind this desire? Is it divine energy wanting to know itself and experience the fullness of its expression in our own conscious embrace? Is it the intelligence of the heart prevailing over our intellectual rationalizations, hard wired as they are in preserving the illusion of ego and its continuance and denying the ephemeral nature of our physical universe? 

And what have I learned thus far on my journey? I continue to make terrible mistakes in judgement. I continue to allow my anger to overcome my equanimity. I allow myself to become isolated and walled off both physically and emotionally from those I love. Though I am tempted to think I come not come very far, I know that is a limited perspective. At least I am aware that I am engaged in all this negativity! Perhaps that is the best learning; being aware of what is happening moment to moment, and trying to get it better the next time; to reduce the suffering in the next moment.