the answer is blowing in the wind

Have you ever looked at a field of flowering poppies after a strong wind has passed .. have you ever observed how the ones which stood proudest and tallest other ones hanging their heads with their necks broken.

The tall poppy syndrome.

A few hundred years ago, Sir Isaac Newton observed

"the bigger they are, the harder they fall".

A few years back, I was sitting in a country pub with a couple of "religious types" wearing their very battered dog collars. These book learned gentlemen had been directed as "missionaries" to spend as some time taking the message of Christianity to convert the "heathen" cockies (the Australian landowners or bush people .. not the aborigine's) into the way of "the Christ".

These two "Bush Padre's" (as they were known to make their presence more acceptable) were going through their own particular "dark night of the soul".

We got to talking ..

They told me how they thought they knew all of the answers. They had their "good book", they had their years in theological College, and they had been taught the "right and proper words to say in order to belong to their particular tribe". They had graduated at the top of their class .. their ego's had volunteered them for the job.

6 weeks after starting out, they were licking their wounds.

Nothing in the "good book" had prepared them for the real world of the Australian outback. Nor had any things they had learned in College prepared them for the people who read the land and talked to their animals. Nothing had prepared them for the wind and the sand.

nor had anything prepared them for the big guy who told them his dog's favourite meal was preachers with bibles .. and proceeded with the demonstration ..

The flooded creek they had just crossed was full of very large crocodiles. The dry land between the creek and the pub was teeming with snaked flushed out by the torrent ..

The whispering winds of change

To give them credit, their education had served some purpose. They were able to be philosophical about this situation ..

I asked them what they had learned ... there was silence for little while.

What we learned out here is that words mean nothing and our idealised self as a spiritual being or teacher is nothing more that an inflated ego.

"Well, we got taught in College all about doctrine and theory and we thought we knew all about religion. What we have found out is that religion and, what we've been taught as the epitome of spirituality, has nothing to do with the real world.

We are not spiritual. We cannot claim to be teachers. Real world people don't need to hear what we have been taught is the right thing to say so that we can belong to the eclectic tribe that gave as a spiritual ego and a false sense of belonging as a panacea."

One of them turned to me and said

"like Jesus on the cross, my spiritual ego, my sense of my spiritual nature, just got crucified. Spirituality can't be learned from books. It can only be experienced by embracing life."

The whispering winds of change can come in many forms.

Sometimes they blow like gentle zephyr and the wise will flow with these winds, gather strength and grow. Others will ignore the warning signs, study learn, try and control who they think they are until a Tornado comes along and, like the tall poppies, they lose their heads ..

The answers my friends, are blowing in the winds ...

[ Back in my school days when the group "Peter, Paul and Mary" were popular, we irreverently nicknamed them "Two Beards and a Bra".]