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Day Book, October 28, 2002

By Remy Benoit

The air outside here this morning is liquid and warm, heavy with the scent of mold. I got a call from Buffalo that they are expecting snow by the end of the week. The clocks were turned back this weekend to Standard Time. It is autumn.

Autumn is the time for bringing in the harvest; it is also a time for evaluation of the summer’s crop and preparation for the winter’s trials

       It is a good time to take note of how much, if any, you have strayed from your chosen path. Side roads may easily divert us; we may just as easily get lost in the woods of day to day survival needs, or imagined needs. Perhaps this is a good time to take a walk, quietly, alone with yourself and to consider what seeds you have sown and in what garden.
If you find that your path has strayed, consider perhaps that you have planted auxiliary gardens to enhance your main fruit, for each thing you learn, each experience you have, can be brought to fruition on the main path of your life’s work, purpose, and, yes, joy.
If you have taken a “ day job “ to support your creative self, what can be brought to your music, poems, paintings, prose from that piece of experience to enhance it.  Perhaps you have learned the realities of low paid work and those who do it. Perhaps you have learned what it means to be an active part of a production team, or how to be of service in one way or another to others. How do the residual colors and auras from that experience splash on a new canvass of your creativity?
Perhaps you develop as your creative flow delicious recipes.  Now that you know the harsh economic verities of low paid work, how can you recipes be adjusted to less expensive, but equally delicious, outcomes?
How can the worried mother you sat across the lunch table from while she agonized over how to afford medical care for an ill child, find voice in your new poem, book, photograph, or painting?
How do you transmit angst, compassion, fear, powerlessness as emotions to others?
How do you make them empathize enough to generate change from their re-actions to your work?

How do you know if you have strayed from your path?

Is the excitement in your life of giving all to what you most love there?

Do you wake with anticipation for the day’s work, or dread?

Perhaps the amount of dread is a good indicator of how far from your path, how far from your true self you are walking. And, if you are not your path, doing only what you can do in the way that only you can do it, well, will that special thing that you are to bring to the world not be left undone?

That thought brought to mind these words from G. De Purucker’s Wind of the Spirit:
Only half the story is told when we say that we have made ourselves and that we are responsible for ourselves.  The other half of the story is what we have done upon others: how we have helped to shape their lives in beauty, or to misshape their lives in ugliness. ( p. 6 Point Loma Publications, Inc. 1971 Wind of the Spirit: A Selection of Talks on Theosophy originally published 1944)

What are you “putting up” this autumn to maintain you through the cold of winter?  What logs have you cut, dried, piled to feed your creative powers to generate what comes best through you to help shape your life and the lives of others?
What torn quilts have you mended; leaky boots or roofs patched so that the warmth of your soul will not slip out into the winter winds and just be dispersed by neglect?

Take a walk quietly, alone down your path.  Mend the potholes, set straight the markers, greet the gnomes that guide your steps with joy.
Tend your harvest well; it will keep you, warm you, grow you through the long winter and provide you with fresh plantings for the spring for the crop only you can grow to sweet fruition.

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