Just last weekend we took the kids to a local farm’s pumpkin patch. We trudged out into the fields pulling a hand cart and everyone picked their own. It was a bright, brisk, October day. Hot cider and other adult beverages were being sold. You could pet the dairy cows out in their pen, and a huge coop was filled with about 100 turkey’s clucking away, ignorant of the huge sign in front that read: FARM FRESH ALL NATURAL TURKEYS FOR SALE!
They’ll all be dead in less than a month.
I’ve always said that the fundamental mistake we make when speaking about the “spiritual life” is the belief that we’re talking about something different than the human experience.
And the fundamental mistake we make when talking about “the human experience” is the belief that because of our consciousness, or our evolutionary development, or whatever other tenets we hold to help us avoid our situation, that means we’re so unique and special that we’re exempt from dealing with the inevitabilities of life in our mortal bodies. That is, exempt from dealing with ourselves as we are and where we’re all headed.
We look at the turkeys in the coop, destined for our dinner tables, and we may pity them, or shrug our shoulders, but we can’t be bothered to admit that we too live in a kind of coop and we will one day join the turkeys.
I’m not the first to ask us to consider our mortality, or the existential absurdity of this tragic masterpiece we call life. But, as Camus intimated, it’s only until we get down to facing the fact that this thing we call life is really a kind of perpetual Winter that we are then able to see and appreciate the invincible Spring that resides in each of us.
Thankfully, that interior Spring can be shared, must be shared, if we are to survive and thrive. We ourselves can be reminders and harbingers of the Spring we each carry in us all the way to our graves. We can leave, like in the legend of the Buddha, flowers blooming in every footprint in our wake. “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.” (Psalm 23)
