Blog 1854 – 10.21.2020

Guess Who, Pooh!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QUhnF0xC1tBmEYtcqKAjG_KjHh8LguTz/view?usp=drivesdk

Guess Who, Pooh!

Just what the doctor ordered on a crisp Autumn day, another delightful Pooh story. Winnie the Pooh and his friends, Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga, Roo, Rabbit, and Owl were created by A. A. Milne, but the Disney adaptations of his stories have made them household words all around the world.

When I, in my mid to late forties, severed my long ties to what I now consider a very narrow religious cult within the Christian tradition (and there are many) for almost twenty years I considered myself an atheist. My dear departed daughter, who in her brief thirty two year stay here, held fast her childhood faith, shared a book to help me make sense of my godless world, The Tao of Pooh.

Emily loved Pooh and this simple explanation of a Pooh view of Taoism comforted me and reconfirmed to me that there are at least grains of truth in all religions and caused me to renew my search of a high power who for me turned out to be the best and highest version of my self which hard as I try to project I often fall short of doing. I believe that we all have a bit of the Divine in us. Like Pinocchio had Jiminy Cricket, hard as we may try to silence that still small voice within us, we too are continually guided, guarded and protected.

I borrowed that guided, guarded, and protected language from The Code -Ten Intentions for a Better World, a bit of New Age Religion that I find helpful.

To me those ten positives make a lot more sense than the perhaps more famous negative Ten Thou Shalt Nots of the Bible. I am especially fond of the first and second intent. Do I buy all of the New Age philosophy or religion? Most definitely not, but then all religions and philosophies are man written and even those listening hard to that still small voice have a tendency to garble the message a bit or fail to realize that personal instructions are just that and there is no one size fits all religion or philosophy, but each of us must find what works for us and be willing and ready always to discard any and all beliefs that no longer serve us or we will find ourselves stuck in the mud or lost in the wilderness.

We all believe in something even if our current answer to Life’s deep questions is, None of the Above, that can often be a most valid answer too. I started yesterday streaming a British detective show, one of my favorite genres. I picked this one because I have seen the lovely dark haired British actress playing in several other roles and she reminds me in many ways of my dear and long departed mother. Sometime it is hard for me to realize that I have been a motherless child for twenty years. I was almost fifty when my mother chose to end her life. My greatest fear as a boy was that my mother would die and leave me alone, I loved her so and still do. My mama allowed her life to become so dark and depressing that she just could no longer bear it. I hope she is over that scary dream and already in the middle of a newer happier one.

The biggest criticism many people have of New Age philosophy and religion is that it teaches personal power and responsibility for the world we create around us and some see that as blaming the victim. I no longer consider myself a victim of circumstances or some conspiratorial plot that Ego or Satan cooked up to bring me down. A friend in a blog recently had a long quote from a favorite writer of his trying to explain why we are instructed to love our enemies. To me the real reason for that request was to help us learn that we have no enemies, just brothers, sisters, and friends some we haven’t come to know and understand just yet.

I started to share something from the crime drama I began streaming yesterday. The series is called Paranoid and most of us have experiences at least a little bit of that first hand by puberty. Still to let it run our lives is to commit a great crime against ourself and others too. In the TV show an older detective, Bobby Day, has for sometime been dealing with stress induced debilitating panic attacks that he has tried to hide from his co-workers. A lovely and perceptive witness to a crime he is investigating, who is attracted to him, invites him to attend a Friends (Quaker) meeting in their town. Most of us know little more about Quakers than the picture on the oat flakes box. She explains when questioned about the religion by her new friend that what he saw at the meeting was the whole of it, friends sitting together, praying silently, comforting one another, believing there is a bit of God in everyone and trying to see it.

I can buy that much, but I am not much of a joiner anymore so don’t expect me to start attending any meetings. Fortunately for me I have never had a problem with drinking, drugs or panic attacks, but if some of you, my friends, do, my heart goes out to you.

Friends can indeed be a comfort. Someone has described fellowship as friends together in the same boat. And that indeed we are just like Winnie and his friends in the hundred acre wood. We are not the same, but we compliment one another as if the Universe had conspired to put an important and unique puzzle piece in every single one of us. We fit together and find our fuller meaning in and through each other. History or her story, it is a marvelous tale.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jeJWENi351fHPRsJkt1gfPG2qHleNKJe/view?usp=drivesdk

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