Day 5.

As eternity whispered to me I sat there often thinking about how my father’s life of insignificance had finished in a meaningless way just like the shadows in the valley before me that merged with the creeping darkness and were gone. In the end, like us all, he was just a nobody who achieved nothing. His life had stretched as the shadow’s at evening and then faded into the creeping darkness of night. Like a plant his life grew, flowered and then was plucked to become a memory that also would eventually wither and fade. I also realized that once I was gone that no one would even know that he had been here. That once I was gone even his memory would be gone, and that was to be my fate as well! Meaninglessness, a striving after wind! The soap bubble of life! Beautiful as it floats through the air, capturing the light as it sparkles, but then ‘poof’, it doesn’t even wet the ground, gone without trace or hope of retrieval.

As I sat there, week after week, month after month until the year was gone, I searched for peace I searched for meaning I searched for love. My mind wandered through the universe beyond to the boundless reaches of eternity. I contemplated depths beyond depths, through corridors of darkness black and huge where never a night nor ever a day could exist. My father had taught me to do that. He was into eastern religions and I was walking in his footsteps. Meditation involved contemplating blackness, nothing, peace!

I often cried out, audibly, to God that IF he were there that he would reveal himself to me. But there was no answer! I wrote a poem called “Whispering eternity” It now reminds me of Eccl 3:11 where Solomon tells us that we have been programmed by God for the longing of eternity. During those moments out there in the hills, and beneath the willow by the river, there came back to me the hollow sound of nothing but fearful beauty, and there in the immensity of eternity my mind wandered, majestic and free, but alone, empty, mortal, In love!

I spent hours in the philosophy section of the library. Then all too soon I had spent a year in one of the country’s great learning institutions, but I had not learned one thing that I wanted to know. I sat in busy places watching the crowds walk bye, wondering if they were searching like I was searching. Wondering if they were grappling with issues of life like I was, or whether they had just become hollow men and women living for each day with no plans for eternity.