Loving the Love Thing

From my initial bedazzled infatuation with the miracle-manifesting wisdom of the East and eager transactions with its purveyors, to angry, despondent disillusionment then on to my arrival, after decades of spiritual practice and earnest re-evaluation, at a place of peaceful gratitude for the good of the Gurus, the good that with humble wonder we may call God, I reproduce here selections from accounts over the years of my evolving, healing attitude toward these divine yet human messengers, teachers and exemplars. In these pages are the essential landmarks and vistas of my peculiar path. From the trackless swamps through which I slogged, seething, thinking of Gurus as grrr-ooze, I ascended at times to bright-aired heights from which I saw those very bogs and bayous to be the source of life-giving streams and cloud-seeding mists that refracted sunlight into celebratory rainbows. These moments of appreciation have increased in frequency and duration and have expanded to include quotidian things so that they no longer seem quotidian at all, which makes quotidian an apt word to describe such things and eventually everything — quotidian, after all, being an unusual word for everyday, ordinary — and the ordinary everyday anything and everything is simply a marvel, the Something that somehow exists, with all of us and all things inseparable parts of that Whole. And that is wholly Love.