A TIME OF INTROSPECTION ---
A MOVEMENT OF SOUL FROM BLINDNESS TO IN-SIGHT

From mid-May through July, our global e-Ministry will be presenting two series, eight essays in each series, with essays to be issued twice weekly. I’m excited about the series. The first series is “Life On The Road Less Traveled By.” Based on Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” the focus of the essays is upon the “alternative” spiritual or transcendent life view that is an antidote to the hum-drum existence embedded in our “activities of daily living.” Any comparisons to “life on the road more traveled by” are mostly implied. The second series of eight essays, “Life On The See-Saw” (from a booklet I recently authored), are autobiographical vignettes. I think my trepidation about sharing the essays was “Who cares?” and so I am trying to balance it all by suggesting that these essays can serve as examples of the process of introspection and encourage readers to find understandings in their own lives -- what key events or experiences made you the way you are? There’s a young nursing coworker with much potential -- I like him a lot -- and I love to “razz” him sometimes. I told him the other day: “These are short easy-to-read autobiographical essays about me and I wrote all of them myself!” ‘Nuff said! But my hope is that readers will use these essays as springboards to their own personal journey of self-discovery. We are a “people of life” in a “culture of life” when we can see the miracles in life.

As I wrote the essays, at a time when my beloved cat Stevie was physically transitioning and I was thinking about the significance of love and life shared, including the love between a person and a cat, I yet again cherished the wonder-fullness of life and love and pondered how sad it is that many among us are blind to seeing the miracles found in every moment. On “the road less traveled by,” we can take the time to balance our “life on the see-saw.” We move from blindness to seeing the miracles.

In Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town” the deceased character “Emily” chooses to return from the grave to view a day in her life, and she is saddened by all that she had missed when still alive among the living. The fellow deceased character “Simon Stimson” (who had warned her not to go back) retorts: “Yes, now you know. … That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance, to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those … of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. Now you know -- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back and see.”

But there’s an alternative to the me-first, selfish, overly-materialistic, unhappy, non-insightful existence. It’s characterized by “open heart, open mind” and we can -- mystically perhaps -- see the “miracle” in everything. In his poem “Miracles,” Walt Whitman writes:

“Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles.” (Go to next page)

Please feel free and welcome to contact Rev. Ousley with any questions, comments or prayer requests.