The Tao of Ordinary...

                                                                          The Tao of Ordinary

            Isn't it true that, given all of our druthers, we'd really just like to be happy?
                           Religion, spirituality, and mysticism are all whatever...
     And the same goes for politics, economics, corporations, and even war and peace...
    Henry Thoreau wrote that the mass of human beings lead lives of quiet desperation...
             This may very well be true, but I don't know the mass of human beings,
      just my family, my past and my present, a number of friends, and another number 
                                         of folks I see occasionally in passing...
               I do keep up with the news: CNN, NPR, BBC, and a few others...
        Mostly I ponder, wash dishes, cook, write, walk, love my kids, love my wife...
                I hope to live long and to eventually die young as old as possible...

I am different from you, no doubt, in many ways... but deeper, I bet that most of us are very much the same. Our hungers, doubts, desires, fears, passions, needs, laughter, and all the rest pretty much boil down to a few core essentials: as much as possible, happiness, health, and that deep emotion of being wanted... in short, we all dream / need / and want our home... that place in which we are safe and content for all of our days...

​We can't buy our way to happiness, health, being wanted, safety, contentment, or home... when any of these show up in our lives: holy moly! No cloud can then shade the sun that shines upon us! We can do anything with love at our back! We want to do everything​ with love in our eyes, hands, and hearts! This is the Beatitude life of our dreams...

​Of course, the quiet desperation that Thoreau was writing about is, factually, the lot of many, many folks throughout our human history... and, of course, it continues today... but our dreams all remain the same... our deepest human needs and desires are all still the same, the same core desires of every human who has ever walked upon this Planet... Now, if only the folks who are possessed of differing desires would just leave the rest of us alone... The Unholy Trinity of Privilege, Profit, and Power, the same as always, gets in the way of our simple and holy desires...

​Our simple and holy desires are the secret grace and wisdom of the Tao of the Ordinary... If not for the machinations of Privilege, Profit, and Power, we would likely all figure out how to feed all of the hungry, to house all of the homeless, and for that matter, how to beat every sword-gun-bomb into ploughshares... We would do this! This is the Tao of the Ordinary: it's all Gospel: it's the Holy Q'uran, the Wisdom of the Prophets, the serenity of the Bhagavad Gita, the smile of the Buddha, the Circle of the Indigenous, the Passion of the Goddess, and the gentleness of the Humanist...

​The kindness and genuine neighborliness of most people on the Planet is really the tao of the ordinary... "Tao" roughly translates as "way", or "path"... even as "dark moon" or enigma-valley... it is a "sacred feminine" outlook upon the world... if World Religions could be thought of as a Very Big Bed, the "Tao" would be the soft blanket we would most like to lay against our skin... "Naturally human" abundant with neighborliness, non-contention, and contentment is certainly how most of us would live if we were to be left alone to simply live our lives...

​This, of course, is not to negate the beauty and wonder of the Christ-Event, nor that of the other World Religions: they each stand as pillars of the human spirit: pillars that mirror back upon the Divine our feeble grasping towards the limits of our imaginations, intuitions, and visions... the Christ-Event, for example, is the Tao in active pursuit of the human heart, much like the poetry of Rumi or Hafiz... To respond to Yeshua, the Poet of Nazareth, with a spirit of surrender and opening is the same mystic-path that flows in the depths of every World Religion...

​We don't need to heed the dictates of the big-shots of religion: but what we do need to do is to adhere to the dictates of our own activated passion and compassion: feed the hungry, love one another, and love the Divine Beloved... as Jesus said, this is real religion: available to every willingly vulnerable heart... It is the Way... Jesus so identified himself with this spirit that he became, in the fullness of his being, our exemplar: the Wayfarer... it is no small thing to carry his shoes as we follow after... this is, completely, the Tao of the Ordinary... and it shows up in making the "world's best" pizza, in serving with a smile, and even as you count the change: it is possible to live as a study in radical amazement: for the opened heart and opened hands...