Whenever the sun has lit the air with such tremendous brightness, something deep within us responds.

                That is one of the recurring themes in what I write. At least that is what I have discovered. But sitting here in this room with sunshine spilling into the world outside the window, I cannot help but feel the familiar twinges. That is how I know that regardless of what moment I am in, whether it is now or was when I was an eight-year-old, I have sensed this thing, restlessly mucking around on some level beneath the surface where I can see sunshine spilling down through the atmosphere into our world.

                And yes, I did sense this even when I was an infant lying in that crib my parents had placed me in. There was a ribbon on the left side of that crib and there was a ribbon on the right. The purpose of each ribbon was to tie gently, oh so gently, around each wrist. And there I was, lying there in that room with ribbons tied and thus it was not possible to develop what was considered a bad habit of thumb sucking.

                It sounds awful, doesn’t it? A little like terrible rituals we shudder to hear about in other cultures. And yet I suspect that the parents in these other cultures feel warmth and love as they consider this child that has been born to them. And in the dim light of early morning, bending over it, aware of its humid scent, the scent of an infant and the hope, the love, the aching sense of wanting this infant to grow into a healthy, happy human.

                And yet we are capable of binding the wrists of a child. At least that was not uncommon when I was an infant. Is that less cruel than the foot binding we are told occurred with the Chinese infants? And there are terrible things. Terrible things done even today, though we try very hard not to.

                And you might nod, expecting that I will give a few examples. But that is just the point. I am not going to give examples because I want us to consider that the ones I might refer to are the very ones we would not be aware of that we do. Some future time, some generations out there in what we think of as the future, someone will glimpse our time and shudder at the things we have done, all the while bent lovingly over this new life, this infant fragrant with that deep, primal scent of new life and such a depth of gooey life.

                But it is the love that matters, no matter what the time. We just have to trust that any terrible misassumptions we have about what is best will be swallowed up in the genuine love and care. Surely it is common for parents to arrive at some point after raising the child and look back and be a bit chagrined and distressed at some of the things they did, fully ignorant at the time the thing happened that what they did, decisions they made, were perhaps dangerous or in some way misguided.

                That idea is on the periphery of the tugs that reassert themselves, regardless of the day in my life. I might step beyond them for a while, caught up in the intricacies of everyday life, forced to work, to balance figures, to see about so many mundane problems. But then, in a moment, paused in between one thing and another, such as just sitting here on a morning with sunlight spilling in through the busted window glass, there it comes. Restless, like a cork bobbing in the water, or like a little eddy, a swirl as some fish rises to the surface to snatch an insect or some thing it is drawn to. 

               Even there in that example it occurs to me that on some level we are all like the fish or the bird or any live suspect, any living bit of a life upon this planet, this world. And we all in every moment on some level are driven by this deft and primal need to be in an environment where we can be comfortable, raise our progeny, have some hope, some plans, and certainly find the edible nourishment.

                And we are, aren’t we? We are such strange, beautiful, creatures. And yet we are enigmas.

                The tugs that I feel, they are ultimately drawn from this deeply present, deeply powerful, unseen instinctive reach for the spiritual. Here we are on another day which on some deeper level calls out to us, resonates within us. Even each lick of energy and heat from the sun that draws a sense of gladness and happiness is there. But part of all that is this mystery, this reach toward the one we have named God.

                And in our time, whether we were infants in cribs and bassinettes or adolescents struggling through the horrendous hormonal changes, literally creaking as we grew, like monsters in a way, if you consider us solely as biological organisms driven by stuff that is the material of determined, viciously programmed life that seems on this primal level to have no compassion, no feeling but just a stubborn, preprogrammed determination to grow and ultimately to reproduce itself. And on one level we are hostages carried along like captives.

                In one sense we really are savages, though we don’t mean to be. There is this silent, dusky part that is in the vicinity of the tug I feel. It isn’t just me. We all have sensed it. And it is here that we come near to this presence, this entity, that we have largely abandoned. At least in this particular moment in our journey through what we think of as time we have abandoned.

                We have this misplaced assumption that we have become sophisticated now and grown beyond it. And yet the awful truth, the imminent secret that will never cease, never desist, is the fact that just as wild and unyielding as the preprogrammed development of these biological forms we are attached to is this other that ultimately is our destiny.

                It is spiritual. And it is the entity that created us and set us here to grow and wrestle with the agonizing tension between our physical, biological selves and the spiritual which will ultimately define who we are and answer the questions that plague us concerning our ultimate reason for being. 

                But certainly it is no wonder that we are tortured, contradictory enigmas. Perhaps we can be forgiven if we are something of a mess. And yet it must be said that we have to return to a path that is built upon the assumption that this entity, this presence that has stalked us since the beginning is a reality we cannot pretend was a part of our primordial past. Far from that, it is actually our future, our reason for being.