Sunlight low slanting.

Green, red, gold, brown leaves.

Dew glinting on grass.

Just reading the news.

I started to write a couple of weeks ago.  Topic: economic meltdown.  I just couldn’t find spiritual inspiration nor much connection to the topic of meditation.  I had a great title: May You Live in Interesting Times.  I guess the times weren’t interesting enough then.

I did get inspired Friday afternoon.  I downloaded the Friday evening closing stock market quotes into my Quicken account.  I like to see how my retirement accounts are doing.  After the download, I felt oddly calm.  The thought that crossed my mind was that we, the collective we that actually includes all peoples, we had turned a corner.  Life as we knew it for the last couple of decades had ended.

I was reminded of a similar change experience I had several years ago.  The memory was a body-mind, gut memory, a physical, emotional response.  It happened at the end of a year when my first wife and I were in the process of breaking up our marriage.  We attended a week-long meditation retreat.  (See.  I got in a connection to the topic of meditation right there.)  At some point in the week I came out of a meditation with a clear realization that I was ready to make the change.  I wasn’t sure what the change would be, but I was physically, emotionally, and consciously ready for all the stress and strain that would come next.  Sure enough, almost as soon as my wife and I got into the car to drive home, we fell right back into our usual bickering.  That was interrupted when we discovered that the breaks weren’t working properly.  We had to suspend the arguing in order to deal with the emergency of finding a repair shop.  Still, emergency resolved and car brakes repaired, we resumed our bickering and argued so vehemently that we decided to resolve our difficulties by getting a divorce. 

The synchronicity of driving toward a divorce in a car with bad brakes turned out to be a good occasion from which to draw all kinds of unwarranted parables.  I remember mentally writing all kinds of spiritual lessons about that interesting timing.  Many of those great lessons were written indelibly in my thoughts while I sat in the negotiations with the lawyer as we deliberated the most equitable dissolution of the marriage.  They were a waste of time.  The real lesson was that all that thinking about synchronicity kept me tightly bound up in the misery of getting a divorce and wishing that things weren’t so miserable.

Looking at the download data in my Quicken account and watching the evening news Friday, I got that same gut feeling.

I admit I am politically liberal.  I say that so that you can understand why I was really pretty pleased to see the end of Reaganomics, the repudiation of Republican neo-conservative policies, and proof of the complete incompetence of the Bush administration.  It was a rather dramatic and to my mind unnecessary validation of the old adage: “Give a man enough rope, and he will hang himself.” 

Still I am reminded that there is little need to bind myself with feelings of vindication.  It’s time to trust the gut assessment that life as I know it has just turned a corner.  There is new work to be done.  My piece of it is to cast votes in the coming election for the people whom I assess to be the best to handle the new opportunities.  And to wait for the first good historical analysis of this past and really entertaining period in American history.