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Friday, April 8, 2011

How I start the day

(This entry was first posted on the old blog on Wednesday, December 29th, 2010 at 11:13 am)

As someone without an existing religion to provide me with ready-made rituals, I’ve had to invent a few of my own. I don’t have very many, but one evolved into the way I start my day.

I keep a 4 oz drinking flask (the kind normally used for stronger stuff) filled with pure water at my bedside (the cleanest, purest water I have, which is generally the stuff from the Brita filter I have for my parrot). I usually wake a couple of hours before I get out of bed, when aside from a short while in the summer, it is still dark. When I wake, I say the following:

I pledge myself to the clarity that cannot be named and I pledge myself to love, and to its expression, justice, which pierces the darkness as starlight pierces the night and promises the dawn.I intend now that every obstacle to clarity and love be removed, internal and external

and I pour a bit of the water on myself, then drink the rest.

This post is really an addendum to the last post. It doesn’t matter how one does it, whether accompanied by a daily ritual, or simply an affair of the heart, but unless one’s spirituality includes a genuine commitment, not merely to oneself, but to one’s fellow beings (no “well, if I get all spiritual on myself everyone else will benefit” excuses accepted here), then one has set oneself well outside the mainstream of the world’s spiritual traditions, and well into the realm of escapist nonsense.

That category would even include my own morning pledge and ablution, should I not take it seriously.

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