Dearest Readers,
A meeting I had scheduled for this morning got cancelled and I decided it would be a good opportunity instead to finish watching the last episode of Tess, a BBC mini-series version of Thomas Hardy‘s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I downloaded the four episodes off iTunes last weekend and have been savouring each one slowly throughout the week, not wanting it to end.
One of the very last scenes in the movie takes place at Stonehenge. I haven’t read the book so I don’t know if the scene is true to Hardy or not but what hit me hardest was not the characters’ story so much as the monument itself. It got me thinking. What’s it all about?
According to the Wikipedia page I linked above, Stonehenge is a burial ground. Huh. But did the builders raise those stones to honour the dead or the living?
Imagine living back then. There are no distractions. It is 2500 BC! What do people think of themselves? What gives them purpose? Not jobs, although perhaps work. The work it takes to survive. There is nothing to take away from the sensation of being. In fact, be-ing is really all you’ve got.
We are alive. What is life? What is death? We do not know. Let us build something to honour Life.
I recently asked a man I know who is a self-professed atheist how he explains the nature of being. He said he’d get back to me. I haven’t heard from him yet!
There was a time when people erected seemingly impossible structures to express their wonder and their awe at the Great Mystery of Life. It’s still being done, yes, and yet I wonder has our intellect become the power to which we build our monuments today?
Sending my thoughts back in time this morning, imagining what it would be like to know nothing of what we know today and be wholly devoted to simply honouring Life each day because nothing else was as important as that action… well, it kind of landed me in a deeper place. Call it True Awareness.
Call it thanks for cancelled meetings!
Inspiring Message of the Day: There is so much around us to distract our senses from Awe. Today I will find my way back there, like a child or like an ancestor, free of worldly concerns and devoted simply to the Wonder of Being.
