As the new universe begins The Very First Light continually fills the universe as it expands…
As the new birth begins in you…
As newness unfolds on a journey to health…
As a new idea begins to rise into the experience of your mind…
As a new revelation slowly reveals itself to you…
As a new beginning starts to unfold…
The very first light is seen.
This week I learned of a situation where a person struggles with feeling are they really “a part of”. It shocked me, I don’t want to go into details of their life, but I do to. In the most peculiar ways, when every covert message and overt message says I actually am, I still feel it and 
sometimes feel it in ways that make me just go someplace else … in an unhealthy way. Aka Run, or just not go there, go-to the other side of the room, stay home, comfort myself. There was nothing at all, zero, nada in this persons life that would have told me this about them other than that person becoming vulnerable. Really it shocked me and at the same time it made me feel a new kind of love for them.
That’s how filters work from our own brokenness, they nudge us to act differently than we would have otherwise. We often come by them honestly and sometimes the causes start at infancy or very early childhood so they are reinforced over a life. Do I hear steal and kill here?? Do I hear a “Lie” ?? Do I hear stronghold ??
A few years ago I tried to capture this feeling, this self awareness in a song, this is it. What came out is a sort of quirkiness. It reflects a start and start to life, other odd sounds and odd beats that come into play in this kind of life. I was surprised how difficult it was to find the same deep melancholy I experience in real life, it just would just not come out in song. I picture Holy Spirit at work here, in the pursuit of creativity myself revealed something about myself. As if in one part of my mental landscape I could sense deep sadness but in another part I could sense a sort of dancing type freedom, in other words I am dualistic in this problem, I carry both sides of the coin inside of me. Me thinks one part of the answer is to focus on the funner part while I work through the not so fun part but sadly, if you don’t experience this you have no idea how hard that can be, especially when other kinds of brokenness finds friends in misery between the brain people inside of me in the conversations of internal life.
It is good to be a part of and its also good to not be because a true journey into the underlying causes of all of that changes you in good ways. The world needs humans that have been through this, that can tell about their experience, that can tell “How they Survive”. It needs people that can be sensitive to other people struggling with this. Some of us are blessed and cursed at the same time but God Redeems all kinds of human conditions. The world needs independent thinkers that understand the importance of being a part of in healthy ways but not fully immersed in the group think that can go on when you give in too much too being a part of. There is also problems in being too much a part of so that can be equally bad, at least at this stage I believe that. Carefully choose your poison !!!
Anyway here it is.
Somewhere on the way to Jasper BC, Canada. We filled our water bottles from streams.
In between 8th and 9th grade I went on a long trip to Alaska. Our first stop was Manatou Springs Colorado. That was a few decades ago, many many RonnieDs ago but I remember it like it was yesterday. That cool little hippy town that I was experiencing then in the early 70’s took my breath away. It just caught my attention somehow and I think I have been trying to get back to that kind of place ever since.
Lake Louis
There are many marker stone experiences in our lives together in regards to the mountains including dating on a Tandem training for a ride through the Canadian Rockies where I fell in love with Leisha. Then there was our Colorado trip on our honeymoon. Countless trips through the American Rockies from New Mexico all the way to the Canadian border… but like I said I have been trying to get back to something they the mountains represented to me, some un-knowable thing, deep inside for decades. It seems it was to complete some image I carried of who I am, what I am about.
Now much later in life this longing is reshaping itself from a journey to a completed me into trying to gain clarity of what the last 1/4 of my life will look like and then a different completed me. Yeah I only expect, I hope to live to 80. In other words, yes Ronnied “Follow that dang Cloud”. So, alas I had to chose off of Colorado yet one more time.
The way it happened was significant. Seemingly closer than ever to a choice towards moving there, sitting on our back porch Leisha, being an introvert recently said this to me. You know Ronnie, all I need is my people and I have that here. Before we started to go-to Church I had a few very good friends and that was enough. Now that we are going to church I have so many more meaningful relationships, I didn’t know that could happen. But I am now seeing there is another kind of person, one that needs something big to do too, you are that kind. I don’t need that, I am very happy for you to have that, but I do wish you had your people too, I am praying about that for you.
That stuck with me and over the next few weeks I began to wake up early and meditate on those points. It began to churn through my mind as I went about the day. Then new things began to show up on the landscape of my thoughts. Difficult things in regards to relationships. It’s not like I never had friends, I’ve had them in spades but more often than not in hind-site they were closer to “Acquaintances”. They didn’t show up when I was down, they didn’t stop by or invite me, there were a few difficult ones and then there was this habit of moving onto the next big thing before they could even get to the good part with me. As I processed those points I began to take inventory of the relationships I do in fact now have that are much different due to this Kingdom experience. I had to ask myself why would I not honor these people by staying here, moving on would cause me to take another 5 years to get there where I am here with some relationships. As I saw more and more value in the kingdom relationships I have here I also realized God was doing something in my life far more important than escaping into a dream. He was in a way asking me to stay here, go deeper and follow more through with what was started here and… he revealed to me I can’t have a relationship with a mountain. No matter how big and beautiful it was, there was nothing there to have a relationship with.
Another way to put the dream I was chasing was fundamentally worshiping the creation more than the creator.
Now know this, another layer of understanding comes from very complicated serious counseling where Leisha and I were told, due to some certain other histories in my past, deeper than surface relationships to me are akin to a man bitten hard by dogs, many of them over many years. The very thing I crave even with her, deep relationship was like asking me to pet dogs… There is something golden behind following this kind of difficult rainbow, I could see that, I was ok with the decision, the duty of it felt good. I told a few very close friends and a pastor but I didn’t tell her.
Later on, on our back porch, I described what had transpired from her original comment on My People and she began to immediately cry, it was a spontaneous visceral reaction. The kind where you see the person in front of you have more than just an emotional reaction, that immediacy, it tells you a lot. I saw it as connection to the Holy Spirit stirring inside of her and I knew it. You see that is at the heart of Gnostiscm, Paganism, escape away from the difficulties of this earth rather than find freedom in the midst of your own personal troubles and I was basically raised in that in my adult years, paganism, that is for many other post, AND… Manatou is very pagan, gnosticish. But here it was, go away to find personal, emotional, internal Freedom. Everything is spiritual, you just need to find your own way, spirit is even in the rocks, the mountains. I don’t actually believe that from what I can see, but at some level… it seems I did.
That kind of thinking is all over the Gospel of Judas. Its all over the Nag Hammadi. It began to leak into our American culture much earlier than the 60’s but something big happened then and the onslaught has continued ever since, merging itself into all sorts of perspectives especially Christian ones. You see, she already knew of the things I was describing, had been quietly praying for a long time I would see differently about them so I would make the right choice for me, for us, for her. She didn’t see it in the terms I am describing, paganism, Gnosticism but she saw it wasn’t the right choice, she some how knew there was something not exactly right about it and the why go for me. She has been tenderly speaking against that choice for 24 years… stop and think about that, 24 &*9%6h years. She knew this !!! So when I described this to her, the Spirit inside of her jumped, her seeing into a moment of very necessary realization on my part came out of her in the form of wet eyes, human water running down her cheeks. She knew deeply this was very important.
I knew I had to stay, those wet eyes and that resonance between us from a woman who has seen into things and me in the deepest ways made the very final decision to stay. Now It felt really good but…
Her favorite Yarn Shop in Telluride CO
A week later we are in my studio, her sitting there crocheting like a ninja, me working on an un-named song, I had some basic things laid out and was looking for a nice lead type layer, found something cool. As I worked through discovering the lead I began to tear up and cry. Something hurt, it hurt a lot, a pain I was not EVEN aware of but I knew and it came out in the lead. The lead in this song really is the cry deep in my soul, how it sounds to me now that I see it. I saved the song down as “Losing Colorado” and I began to grieve deeply AND go into a discussion with my good good Father as to the why.
It was painful because I had to now trust a different kind of dream, not my escaping dream and trusting in dreams that involve people to the extent I am describing are massively difficult for me. I had to go deeper into this changing world view thing, I had to let the Holy Spirit reveal more of what were deeper recess’s of thinking I had, where that came from. A certain kind of view that has been building in the West for over a hundred years but broke out in the 60’s. Not really my decade but yet it was. It was also painful because I didn’t see this inside of me. How could I trust anything that I believe ??? How can I ever know enough ??? A certain kind of world view had to be deconstructed inside of me. Just like the 1st, 2nd and 3rd century church had to fight off Gnosticism I had to make some new decisions on parts my world view, I had to fight those off too. But I had to also grieve all of this… Thus this song, even though I understand the why’s, even though I tell myself and other people “I Will Follow”… this ask hurt, but then maybe all dying to self does !!!
And this my friend is how Following the Cloud can look.
For the next step in the journey see this…
I have known more than my share of grief and pain. I have experienced the kind of grief and pain that comes as no cause of your own and I have known the other kind, mountains of self-imposed grief and pain. Depressive pain that last years. I have shared more than my allotment of anger but one thing I also know is I have experienced large doses of peace. I have experienced large doses of self-imposed peace as in the kind of peace that comes over you after you just took in a nice big fatty. Standing on a tee box looking out over a well-manicured golf course on a soft late spring day where the air is still cool and the sun feels good on your face. Sliding down a perfectly groomed run, early on a winters morning with mountain peaks jumping skyward all around you, the sun coming up, blue bird skies ahead, you were first chair, no other tracks before you. All seems to be well within you soul….
And… as well, a kind of peace I believe only the Spirit can give as a gift. A kind of peace that comes even in the worst of circumstances, that doesn’t require circumstance to be in your favor to know it. So I think, for myself I can know the difference and I believe strongly there is.
God said: You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
In my opinion two religions or world views were established in that moment. One world view was tied to the tree of Life… All others were tied to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil… Pagan. Now I am not using Pagan in the strictest sense of the word and some people will want to call me out on that, I know because some have. My hindsight or my experience, to me, tells me that for myself, when I choose the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, at some point I have to manufacture my peace and I have found ways to do that as I described above, but when I choose the Tree of Life as my source then I receive a different kind of peace that comes from somewhere else in side of me that is not of me. This song, No Pagan tries to describe what that second kind of peace feels like… It surely is a peace that passes all understanding, its one of the most desirable things I have found in this world and it comes as a result choosing the Tree of Life… Jesus.
So that is one layer. Another layer is a recent song a thing I went through. After decades of wanting to move to Colorado, after a near year of discussion I decided not to and that story is covered in another song and another blog post… A few weeks after that step began a peace fell over me and thus this song.