Day 11

The moment we are born we all begin a great quest, It maybe years before we realize it or before it becomes apparent that we are constantly searching. I was Searching for something I had never had. I was searching. Searching for something more important than anything else in life. Sometimes we try and forget it. Sometimes we attempt to lose ourselves in other things. Sometimes we may think that we are freed from the need to go on seeking this nameless thing. Then something always brings us back to it. A funeral, a tragedy, a lost love or some other life event.

In other moments of reflection I used to sit in busy places and watch all the people going by and wonder if they were seeking like I was, or where they just going through life like lambs. Did they ever think about the meaning of life? I was seeking something I could not describe but new I wanted and needed. Some people seemed to have found fulfillment. Some had found fame and fortune but they had not really found peace, and this they will tell you. Wealth and fame are as empty as the vagrant wind and the vicissitudes of life.

All mankind is on the same quest. All humanity is seeking the answer to the confusion, the moral sickness, and the spiritual emptiness that oppresses the world. All mankind is crying out for guidance, for comfort and for peace.

By the time I was 20 my head was crammed full of knowledge but my soul was a spiritual vacuum. Inside me was a hunger and a burning. I had spent a year at one of the countries great learning institutions but had not learned one thing that I wanted to. I had read the books of the great philosophers and the scriptures of the great religions but my soul was still empty.

It was now 1974

Everyone called her “Auntie” because she had never married, and that’s what she was to those around her. I turned up on her door with my Tri color Collie called Karla. I had set out about 18 months earlier seeking to satisfy the voice within my soul. While farming a longing grew within me. I used to stare at the hills and have the urge to just go over them and just keep on going. Something was drawing me. I had this deep call within me. I was young, the world was calling and I felt waiting for me was an appointment with His Infinite Majesty.

I began by taking a job doing relief work for farmers that wanted holidays. I would look after their farms for a couple of weeks while they went away. I would often work a couple of weeks and then have a couple of weeks holiday myself and sit on a cliff over the ocean and watch sunsets and sunrises. Or some times I would drive deep into the forest and sleep in my panel van. I was like a piece of driftwood on the ocean with nothing but the current of time to wash me around. I saw my life as footprints on the shore of eternity, soon to be erased by the incoming tide and lost forever without trace.