A crazy driver almost killed me this this morning, but it was only later admiring my beautiful latte that I realized how lucky I’d been to escape with my life. And how it sometimes takes a close call to make me remember that every morning is a new leaf, a new unfolding. Anything could happen. You could have a vision, discover your spirit animal, get a message from your dead mother. The dog could learn to answer the phone. The man in the moon could be on the other end of the line. Does that sound preposterous? How much more preposterous that we rise every morning with hope, love with abandonment, make far-reaching plans, see them fail, plan again, endure with grace, dream, celebrate and play, all with the certain knowledge of our eventual extinction. How brave, beautiful and preposterous humans are.

From the little reading I’ve done on Ayurvedic medicine, I’m pretty sure I lean toward the kapha type and right now I need to find my fire. Lately, I sleep way too much, avoid exercise and feel generally flat and uninterested in things happening around me. My mind wants to hide from the world, while I know my body needs vigorous sweaty stretching and exercise. Given my Puritanical upbringing, I’m quick to accuse myself of laziness, but I really think my whole system — emotional and physical — is totally out of balance. I just signed up for a 30 Days of Yoga home practice to try and find my way out of this mental torpor. It requires a commitment I’m loathe to give because I’d rather stay in bed until 15 minutes before I’m due at work, or sleep the weekend away and my problems with it. My 30 days starts on Saturday. I’ve set an intention (to wake up) and a commitment (to show up), two things that are missing in my life right now. I’ll give you a progress report at some point, but what do you do to wake up your sleeping beauty?

I’ve been extra lucky with all the flights I’ve taken the last couple of years. No horror stories, or long security lines or late arrivals or take-offs, but my trip to Seattle was fraught with glitches on the way home … delayed flight, missed connection, comical/tragical trudging from one line only to be sent to another over and over, and finally having to spend the night in a Delta flophouse hotel in Atlanta with so many in-room cautions about safety that I thought I might be in more personal danger on the ground than in the air. At one point, I wanted to kick someone’s head in after I’d been routed to the same “help” line three times, but otherwise I mostly managed to stay in a stoic stupified zen zone through the whole ordeal. And in some ways, being extra tired and beaten down helped flip my normal point of view. On the last leg of my trip I sat right behind the wing, and I had the sense of riding on the back of an angel. I’ve always thought that if angels exist, they must be gigantic, outsized Amazons, and for that hour, all my fear of flying was gone. I usually stay glued to a book during a flight, but this time looking down at the fields and woods and winding creeks and marsh and the drifting bits of cloud, the earth seemed magical and astounding again. The shadow of the plane passing over the ground below made me wonder if the shadow of divinity doesn’t pass over us daily, but our eyes are glued to work, errands, shopping, all our little time-passers and we just don’t notice.

So far in life, I’ve managed to order from an a la carte menu of spirituality, but it’s not all that filling. Even my mood board has a little identity crisis with its Madonnas, Fridas and Holy Elvis sharing space and reflecting my ongoing search for enlightenment. I’m a little bit hell-fire Methodist with a splash of Whiskeypalion and a dash of Buddhism  thrown in for variety. Wait, I’m also a faux follower of Kabbalah so I can get the red string bracelet and the daily Kabbalah emails, and lately I’ve been reading about mystical  Sufism because I love Hafiz and I’m fascinated by ecstatic whirling dervishes. My Methodist grandmother would spin in her grave at the thought I might start whirling, but after all her husband was a jack-leg (self-taught) preacher until he suddenly refused to set foot in church again for some mysterious reason. Maybe he woke up one day and decided it was all baloney.  I lack the discipline to give myself wholeheartedly to any of these faiths. I don’t want to go back to the cheerless church of gloomy God I grew up in, and although the Book of Common Prayer is historically interesting, I just can’t buy into the Nicene Creed (made up by a bunch of mere men). Some of my friends have personal chefs to stock their freezers with dinners or personal trainers to get them into physical shape, but I really, really need a personal trainer for my soul. Not a life coach or a purpose-driven pastor or a Freudian therapist, but a spiritual sherpa who would take me deeper into the Mysteries. I’m looking for a rigorous philos0pher with angel tendencies, and I’m shocked there is no one offering that service to my generation of starved-for-meaning Baby Boomers. In the tradition of my grandfather, maybe I should hang out my own jack-leg shingle:

Meaning of life debated here!

No answers, only questions.

Bring your doubts, fears, wildest conjectures and a bottle of  good red wine.