When I was about six years old, I was sitting on the top step of our back porch with my right arm around Susie. Susie was a wise old collie and was quite content to just sit with me and listen to my silent musings. I mused a lot for a six-year-old boy. It was summertime and the sun was warm upon my face. At this particular moment I was thinking about the world and wondering if it was real. What if it were all an illusion? What if life as I experienced it was really just a dream that one day I would awaken from? How was I to know that what I saw, touched, and experienced was real or imagined? It was a dilemma. How could I truly know? I asked Susie. She licked my face. Her tongue was warm and slightly sticky. That certainly felt real, I thought.
What if God created this imaginary environment to test me? What if life as I experienced it was just some kind of cosmic test? Would it affect how I behaved? Would I still fight with my brother? He was older, bigger, stronger, and always bested me, but there were moments when I felt I had to fight. Would I choose to fight if I knew this life was a test? Or would I choose another path? All of these thoughts whirled in my brain, and occasionally as I aged, I would hit “replay”, and the little boy thinking about God and life would come rushing back.
Sometimes when life has been hard, I wonder if it is all an illusion. If so, it is tolerable because the pain isn’t real. Or maybe the pain is real, and somewhere in the pain there is an undiscovered solution. What is the lesson? Perhaps truth comes out of pain. Can you live life as a mystic and experience truth? I wonder. I haven’t progressed much since age six. I still am in a state of wonder.
Husbandry 