Reclarification Of One's Vision

I am expecting to be a father any day now. Yeah, someone is going to grow up calling me 'Poppa.' How about that! It makes me smile and get all warm and fuzzy inside just thinking about it. It also leads me to other considerations pertaining to the writing that has been appearing on this blog. Most especially it has me thinking very deeply about this thing called 'vision.'

Having a child is certainly conspiring to get me to focus on more clearly and coherently on what exactly are the values and ideals--the teachings, the attitudes, the humours, the emotions, the feelings, the dreams, the possibilities... the realities even--that I see fit to share with Uriah. What, in short, is so important to me (has meant so much to me as a person) that I cannot help but share that with my son?

The irony in all of this is that rather than becoming an end to my so-called 'spiritual life' my becoming a father is resulting in a more intensely focused and clarified spiritual vision. Having a child is really cutting out the bullshit! I am only interested in what works. Meaning, I am only interested in what is going to have a beneficial impact on Uriah's development as his own person in communion with a world that will be shared with others, as well as unique to him.

Perhaps I won't be reading as many 'spiritual titles' as culled from the aisles of Borders. Perhaps I won't spend as much time surfing on the Net reading up on the latest escapades of Integral Institute, Ken Wilber, Human Potential, and Transpersonal Psychology. Perhaps I won't be meditating as much. Perhaps my waling meditations in the woods will be cut short now and then. And yet while all of this lies on the side of greatest probability, another more than likely scenario is that whatever spiritual illumination I have been blessed to glean from all of these years of investigation and practice will be refined in the fires of 'what matters most.' The wheat gets separated from the chaff.

Don't take this to mean that I am going to make Uriah's development some personal project of mine; that raising him will be a job fit for efficiency and cost-effectiveness. I understand that raising Uriah will be as much about my own personal, psychological, spiritual development as a human-being as it is his. I guess that is one of the things that I feel is too often overlooked---perhaps most by those in extreme spiritual settings: which is that becoming a parent is as much about the parent's development as it is the child's. We are, after all, no more static than a growing, developing, emerging child engaging the world fresh and anew each and everyday. Our development is at issue in our having children as much as the child's development is. We are, as parents, either realizing our deep reserves of Being, or not!--and perhaps we do so (or fail to) to the exact degree that we assist the child in the discovery of their own authenticity and genuineness.**

So, as I sit here and await the birth of Uriah I consider very deeply the 'shape of things to come.' The proverbial rubber is about to meet the road! I have a feeling that a lot of crucial distinctions are about to be made concerning what matters only peripherally, and what is of central and utmost importance. Distinctions of significance hang in the balance.

Uriah's imminent emergence into this-world is refining consciousness like no previous meditation I have had the privilege to take part in ever has. His birth according to popular spiritual (mis)conceptions is not overtly spiritual. It involves not the Himalayas or the Ganges, the River Jordan or Mecca. It is not the Wailing Wall or Sedona. It is not a loin-clothed hermit sitting alone on a mountaintop. And yet, for this man it is the spiritual blessing of a lifetime; having already done more to refine and clarify 'what is significant' vs. 'what is superficial.'



**(by the way, ever get that genuine and genuis share similar etymological roots? is being genuine being a genuis?).