Evening Post. Stormy weather. Head for the tents.

Greenbelt campsite a few days ago.

The artist in me stayed alive from my childhood, when I saw, laying in bed at night, dramas play out in the moonlight shadows cast through branches onto a bedroom wall.

Cloudy weather is the same. Stormy was the time when at about 28yrs old I was crossing the English channel on a sixty foot ketch and the waves were coming over the deck and I was helping to wind down the sails so we could ride the storm out. Because the picture on the left is still, there is a something serene about it.

But now I shall get back to the serenity that is here with me and my German sheepdog Buster. My two sons were disappointed that we we unable to take him to dog training, as there had been a nasty accident on the motorway and so my sister, who was taking us wouldn't arrive in time. They have gone home for the night and so I shall wind down and prepare a relaxed countenance for my art therapy session tomorrow.

LIVING FREE FROM DESIRE

Our will is fuelled by lusts and desires. The mystical way is to give up those desires and desire only what is. To transend ones ego truly we must abandon the desire for God or Truth or whatever name we give our spiritual goal. Meister Eckhart wrote:

A man must become truly poor and as free from his own creaturely will as when he was born. And I will tell you, by the eternal truh, that so long as you desire to fulfil the will of God and have any hankering after eternity and God, for just so long you are not truly poor. He alone has true spiritual poverty, who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.

The mystics tell us to concentrate all of our desires into the one desire to know God, (God alone is enough!) and then finally, as we cross the threshold of realization, to be ready to aandon this also. The Hindus imagine the separate self consumed in fire, like a corpse on a funeral pyre. The desire for God is like the stick with which the priest stokes the fire to make sue the body is completely turned to ash; when it is, the stick to is thrown into the flames.

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