Spirits

This is a great old ballad written by Merle Haggard and performed by the Grateful Dead. Right click and open in new tab then you can simply listen without having to watch the video. "Sing me back home, a song I used to hear, make my old memories come alive, sing me away and turn back the years, sing me back home before I die." (right click on the highlighted text to open in another page and listen to the song while you watch the video. The song is a little longer than the video.) Click here for a shorter version with a series of appropriate photographs by Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers. It's time to sing me back home.
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Jason sent me over a thousand old family pictures. The picture above is a composite of three photographs from different years. I believe I was between 10 and 12 years old at the time. The picture of my mother and father in the background was taken at their 50th wedding anniversary in 1976, the tint, is the glow of the sunset on the Pacific Ocean at Sunset Beach in Warrenton Oregon taken earlier this year.


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The old pictures are nice to look at for many reasons. I enjoy the mysterious sense of the unreality of that which I know was as real as this moment typing on the keyboard. I have the feeling I may yet understand it all. If something so concrete as your own personal reality can simply vanish and at the same time remain the same, what does it mean?




Copyright 2010 by David H. Roche

In The Beginning: BEING

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The origin and therefore the meaning of life depends on how we regard the fact of our existence. I prefer to regard that one indisputable fact that 'I am' in the light that something greater than me supports this whole thing called life. A lot of people call that God. Designations have always been important but not always accurate as meaning becomes obscured and lost in a wilderness of words. Gods have taken on many different characteristics, but fundamentally remain the same. They are represented as those which impact our lives and which we must reconcile ourselves with because they are the ultimate source of our existence.





Paul Tillich referred to this indefinable something that supports everything as 'the ground of being'. I like that, it suits me. God, for me, is that which upholds and gives the impetus for everything to keep on keeping on. I do not feel separate from this alchemy. Not since I traded theology for experience anyhow.

The creation story in Genesis is just that, a story. It is not a blow by blow account of God going through the details of creation. A little bit of dust, a little bit of breath, presto Adam and Eve. No wonder people don't believe in God when they're told this is how it has to be. Six days, 144 consecutive hours that's it and that asking follow-up questions is inappropriate.

None of us can remember a time when we were not here. We can remember those who are not here and we fear not being here. But there is no record of those who are not here ever having knowledge of not being here, or of complaining about not being here. It is as if creation is eternally present.

Copyright 2010 by David H. Roche