by Robert Griffith

Created on: April 29, 2009

The Common Clay, the Ephemeral Dust

My name is the name of my father. In 1948 I was the first born child and grandchild of my family. I had a Siddartha-like childhood. I was the son of a prince of a small midwest farm town, shielded and loved and pampered by all, the first-born princeling of a generation. In my beginnings I was loved. I grew strong and confident and spirited and loving, and life sang in my veins like a hymn.

When I was seven my father died. His loss a white-hot growth accelerator in my mind, an ache in my heart. The traumatic stressor, the emotional kinkit blasted me onward. Life was complex, dangerous and horrifying. Best to pay attention. Soon life offered me many pains, and they formed my experience. Always they were greater than I had expected.

We're all dying. We're all at the mercy of a universal principle. Small things get bigger. Limits are enlarged. Simplicity heads toward complexity like a rocket, scarcity turns into abundance, a barren planet turns into a garden, a child becomes a person, a life becomes an ever-expanding field of growth. Plants move through a cycle of fulfillment and destiny without limit, existing wholly within the process. In the natural evolutionary process of life the individual carries on toward ever higher levels of organization.

We are all here, rising in consciousness. Here, where the eye turns the image of things seen upside down. Here, where when we write of things as they happen we are able to convey the reflection to others best if we reverse the order of the sentences written. It is a place of complex mundanity, the curtained side of wholeness and reality where poles of light and dark pulse in majesty and the divided mind struggles with separation and illusion.

We are here, where the Christ is in each, the Buddha. Here in a place beyond the divided mind where a whole and holy Universe includes and reconciles its every manifestation in its own supreme, absolute perfection.

Yet if I choose to turn toward complex mundanity from the edge of Occam's razor, it is not because I don't know the simple answer. It's my choice. My choice is the common clay, the ephemeral dust. The multitude has made the same choice. I join them. If I am aware of the choice and they are not, there is still no difference between us.

We are in a place where the unanswered question comes unburdened with considerations of what is best and highest and most real and true. Here, engulfed in a great spiritual mystery where joy and pain and fullness

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