Walking in awe.

When I was little, I liked to lay in the grass and watch the clouds. Their magnificent size escaped me in place of their ability to assume the shapes of things I knew.

It wasn't until I was eleven and on a plane heading to California that I realized how enormous the clouds really were. How wonderful to be propelled higher, and look at them from above.

Now, as an adult, I see clouds for what they are. Water vapor in the atmosphere. For some years, the mundane things were simply back drop. I'd lost my ability to appreciate them as I once had.

One day, as we were driving out west into the mountains of North Carolina to look at a school for our son, I noticed the shadow of a cloud on the side of a huge mountain. It was the profile of a wolf. I glanced up at the cloud and saw a cloud, but the sun's light shining down on top of that cloud made the exact profile of a huge wolf.

My imagination was set on fire.

But who had conjured the wolf? Had the sun? Was it the handiwork of someone beyond my sight? Was it a message? I should have taken a picture as evidence to my sight, but my phone was charging.

Now, after a long time, I realize that it was my imagination, as Smokey Robinson sings, running away with me. There was no wolf. It was a trick of the light, a trick of my position and perspective. I hadn't seen a message from above but an optical illusion.

That's worrying. I had fallen for an illusion created by my own mind. In a sense, I had wanted to see a wolf. Perhaps it was my subconscious, or a delusion . The really worrying part was how readily my mind accepted what I saw. And also, how quickly it wanted to make what I saw a message from an unseen power.

Now, I say unseen power. What I mean is that, if I were superstitious, I may have taken it to mean any number of things. What it really meant was nothing at all.

Now, I can look up in the sky, be blown away by the beauty of it, be blown away by how my mind sees a giraffe or goose or George Washington, and I can say "Wow! Look how that cloud looks like ______." My friend can say, " Washington? More like a Frigidaire." I will be happy either way.

The change here is that I have accepted that the mind is capable of deceiving even itself. It wants to see messages where there are none. It wants to be contacted.

Now, some people will not discern.
They will say that the wolf or whatever they see in the clouds is God telling them something. They will say God wants them to save the wolves or something. They will allow themselves to be completely cowed by their own mind. And they will be so convinced that you will not be able to speak reason to them. This needing a larger message from above is so important to them they cannot let it go. It obsesses them.

So it goes. There are those who are so enthralled by this sort of thinking that it eats away at their ability so see the clouds and the forest and the mountain for what they are. And what they are are phenomena worthy of awe and wonder for their own right and not seen as messages from above.

This blog and its purpose are my writings which will try to do two things: break us away from the messages of illusion and get us to focus on the larger picture. It is designed to find awe and wonder in the world, not clouded by a desire to be contacted directly by unseen powers. In its writings I hope to help my readers, where our awe really needs to be applied.

And in the end, what I hope to accomplish is the realization that we can find wholeness within ourselves and be free to think for ourselves without fearing that we are in any way doing something wrong.

And hopefully, we can find freedom.