Have you ever: lost your sense of “little-s self”— personality and ego – and simply been? Experienced a moment, a minute, an hour of Me; True Me? Without thinking? Without wondering? Been in a way you’d describe as Self-ing (with a capital S)? As if you were absolutely stable and unmovable, rooted in heaven coming down through you and earth rising up through you and meeting somewhere in you?
Think about John Muir. We can read and reach for how he describes what he feels when he’s in the wild—that Knowing that God is through it All, that animals live and die for themselves (not us), that we live and die and it’s absolutely all right….We read how Muir abandons professional life, distributes his possessions to friends and family, and enters the American wilderness in an “unconditional surrender” to its call. He says: “In September 1867, I abandoned conventional society to go wholehearted and unafraid, into the American wilderness. I bade adieu to mechanical inventions determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.” Muir felt resigned to a fate he could no longer resist. “I wish I knew where I was going, Doomed to be ‘carried of the spirit into the wilderness,’ I suppose. I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but cannot, and so there is no rest.”
Perhaps this is how it feels to give our lives over to our Origo, our “I Am-ing” (not over to our ego-ing or personality-ing), whether that takes us, as it did Muir, out into the wilderness or to the ocean or to Congress to make national parks or to political conventions before the next election.…To come to be in the world as I Am-ing is a boon, what I say about I Am-ing is a boon, what I do guided by I Am-ing is a boon.
Ben Leichtling
