While The Fires Are Burning, We Must Watch The Shadows

People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
---Joseph Campbell

The dragon of our Western tales tries to collect and keep everything to himself. In his secret cave he guards things: heaps of gold and perhaps a captured virgin. He doesn't know what to do with either, so he just guards and keeps. There are people like that, and we call them creeps. There's no life from them, no giving. They just glue themselves to you and hang around and try to suck out of you their life.
---Joseph Campbell

When morales can no longer be validated above they must be validated below. By life ... of which it must be said, at the very least, there isn't anything else. What serves life, enlarges and enriches it, is good; what destroys or diminishes it is bad. Is this the source and meaning of morals?

But what life is meant? Cannot be all life. We go out of our way to save skylarks and otters, condors and the sabertooth tiger, but as indulgence not sacrifice. When it's we or they we chose ourselves, waste no tears over cancer cells or tubercle bacilli, bugs on our windshield, or sheep in the slaughterhouse. So who is "we"? All mankind? But men tear at men: where else but here do we need a guide? Do I, as a German in 1934, acquiesce to the Third Reich, fight it from underground, or flee?Do I, as an American in 1966, support my country's stand in Vietnam, oppose it, or do nothing? To stand above such conflict, holding hands with God, loving all men, is to dodge the question, walk out on the examination as if having wandered into the wrong classroom: "I didn't approve," said the German, "but what could I do? Anyway, I really didn't know what was going on."

Allen Wheelis

The Life We Desire Seems To Be Saying No

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end ... This is the motive of every action of every man. But example teaches us little. No resemblance is ever so perfect that there is not some slight difference, and hence we expect that our hope will not be deceived on this occasion as before. And thus, while the present never satisfies us, experience dupes us and from misfortune to misfortune leads us to death.
Blaise Pascal in Pensees

Dad, If You Can Hear Me, Please Yell

I walked the fields and woodlands my entire life because it made me feel good.

I stopped hunting and fishing 15 years ago because I no longer wanted to inflict pain and death upon the wildlife any longer. The only shooting that I do now involves a camera.

The only way any of those creatures deserved to die by my hand was if I was starving.

I don't have anything left to prove to myself or my neighbors any longer concerning my manliness. I finally know who I am.

God only knows that it took long enough.

I realized after all these years that I hunted and fished because I had been trying to connect with my Dad. Somehow I had assumed that if I hunted and fished, rode dirt bikes, drank beer, and worked hard, eventually I would gain his respect and attention. What I didn't understand was that was his requirements for everyone else but me. I don't know what he expected from me and I'll never know. What I do know for certain was that it wasn't in the cards for me to have a Dad.

If I could have only figured that out earlier, it would have saved me so much grief.

We all have to live and learn, don't we?

Well, I thought since I couldn't have an earthly dad then maybe I could have a heavenly father.

So I spent almost 10 years immersed in theological studies trying to get to know who God was.

While I learned quite a bit about spiritual principles I still have yet to be hugged and told that I am glad to be your father.

Was there really something inside of me so bad that I had to be totally rejected before I could learn to be a decent dad to my son?

I tell my son that I love him all the time and I found that it really ain't that difficult.

Fathers, do yourself a favor today and tell your son that you love him.