Sophia and I had a lovely walk this morning along Vancouver Lake. It ended up consuming enough energy that she’s currently crashed on the floor at my feet, something that rarely happens so early in the day. I guess the 3.5-mile mark did it. I feel pretty good but definitely need to stretch. Soph and I generally get around 4 miles a day but not in one chunk. 

Today the weather was glorious, the sky so blue, the lake calm and glassy. The idea of turning around and heading home didn’t arise, so we just kept on walking. The North Lake Trail is quite lovely with the skeleton trees beckoning views of the lake that are normally hidden during the summer.

Driving home from the lake (that’s kind of funny isn’t it … driving to walk … oh what a world) I started laughing and nearly had to pull over. Life was cracking me up. I was musing about all the various ways we do life, the right ways that we tend to be so fond of. I’d read someone’s comment on a friend’s post and evidently it was tickling a chord within me.

His version of rightness was that enlightenment was unlikely for meat eaters. Evidently (and I bought into this one years ago so this isn’t a snub on my part) eating meat lowers the vibration sufficiently to keep one from the higher resonance of enlightenment. 

As that one tiptoed through my awareness, I saw a flicker card of all the ways we limit life winking and moving like a motion picture, all the various restrictions and freeze frames we employ to certify life as it is, to make certain that enlightenment remains beyond the reach of the common man, if not for ourselves, for those damnable others. 

You better not eat meat, nothing with a face. Meditate daily. Study with a guru or steer clear of them. Clean out the weeds in your garden, all those people that bring you down. Don’t vaccinate or at least stay away from pharmaceuticals. Think positive thoughts — just say no to anger. Hell no, don’t even think about being you.

You see … every single version of rightness denies your innate beauty, your already thisness, the perfection of you as you are … and none of them have anything to do with what this is, what you already always are.

That’s why I cracked up. I saw myself, all the ways I attempted to do an end around on life. That’s really what all the restrictions are — ways to outwit life, to beat the game, to come to the edge of the cliff and push yourself off. In that sense they are wondrous friends, glittering gifts that life scatters about for us to trip over so that we may trip smack into ourselves, into who we are, into what this is.

There is no right way unless you want to call life as it is the right way, for it is the way life is appearing in this moment and couldn’t be otherwise … or it would be.  The appearance of life, of how it looks and feels, of the contents of consciousness, has absolutely. nothing. to. do. with the Actuality, with Infinite Aliveness, with what some call enlightenment.

Hence, the laughter. If only I had known. Nah. I would have never believed it!