The Nest

By this time of year commencement is over and the leftover potato salad, ham and congratulations cake from all those grad parties have been put away. For many parents this passage is a benchmark in their own journey with respect to their family nest. My 13 year old daughter left the nest this morning, if only for a short while, to embark on a 24 day journey that will take her to the Alaskan wild.

My previous post began a reflection on a collective conscious that connects my life with the meaning and mission of past travelers from other times. Today my thoughts are on Kaitlyn and how her own emerging meaning and mission is itself shaped to an undeniable extent by my own journey, especially that part that is revealed and experienced within the framework of family. Likewise I carry something of her meaning and mission. Life is never exclusively about my own meaning and mission nor do I live my life alone.

The family I have tried to build is neither new nor my exclusive creation. There is but one nest that my family and I share with you, with all who came before us and with all who will follow.

© Copyright 2007 gentlefootprint. All Rights Reserved.

Friendship Cake

Friendship cake. That delectable treat you bake at home using starter dough received from a friend. Part of the dough is set aside, maybe to share with a friend or, perhaps, yummy as it is, kept to start another cake granting it a sort of eternal life within your home.

When you consider that the friendship cake's existence is derived from an original recipe that is sustained as the dough passes hands into time, each friendship cake is the offspring of the original and a relative of all other cakes.

Similarly my existence, although subject to what I want to make it to be within the windows and doors of opportunity I am able to open, is comprised not just of my life, but of the starter dough of myriad lives that come before me going back in time. There is a sense in which the eternal life of those who came before me is played out in the unfolding of my own existence. Their life meaning and mission forms a collective conscious that lies deep within my soul.

As I reflect back over this life from my earliest memories as a child, I now recognize instances where memory and the fodder of my thoughts and imagination transcended what my experience had been at the time. The only possible explanation is that, in such moments of reaching inward, I was connecting with that collective conscious and touching the most intimate experience of all those who comprised it.

© Copyright 2007 gentlefootprint. All Rights Reserved.