Winter people

I want to express my appreciation to the winter people for what they bring to the desert every year. (I am sick of the cliche ‘snowbirds’) We all know that they bring money that is good for business but what we often forget is something equally important; they bring in new ideas. There is a cross fertilization of minds and approaches to issues.

I see this in a very vivid way every Sunday morning at my Symposium. For three or four months we have a very large group of winter people. Our discussion period of about half an hour is stimulated and inspired by observations from those who are not desert people.

An enormous amount of personal and spiritual growth can take place in a group where both the speaker and the people cherish freedom, the freedom to doubt, to question, to be honest in the search for those values that enrich our lives, knowing that religion does not have to be wedded to nonsense and absurdity.

Like our regular desert people, our winter people come to the presentation and discussion with an open mind and spirit. There are no magical religious rituals and no recitation of memorized verbal formulas or creedal cliches. In this flowing of free thought something happens that is wonderful and exciting.
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Frantic lives and lost souls

I recently read a most moving story about Clive Lythgoe, the piano virtuoso, who was living the frantic life of one concert after another and as a result was coming unglued mentally and emotionally. Leonard Bernstein had a frank talk with him one day and said…”son…you need to recover your soul.”

You see, frantic, frenetic and frenzied activity never has “soul”. Nervousness, which is a substitute for calm, deep energy never has soul. According to my dictionary, the ‘frantic’…’frenetic’ and ‘frenzied’ life ia a life of “nervousness, marked by anxiety driven activity combined with intense compulsive and obsessive activity.” This is the perfect definition for an absence of ‘soul’…as Bernstein noted.

A life with ‘soul’ is ordered, calm, tranquil, authentic, centered, not trivial, shallow or superficial and has substance. Energy that has “soul” is never frantic, frenetic or nervous activity. There is an aura that radiates out from people who have “soul” energy.
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The courage to be true

“This above all…to thine own self…be true…and it must follow as the night the day…thou canst not then be false to any man…” Hamlet

The courage it takes to “be true to thine own self” is enormous. We have pressure from all sides to be everything other than our true selves. Pressure is often constant from family, peers, friends, society, relatives for us to be what “they” want us to be. Or that we do whatever it is “they” want us to do. The pressures of society can keep us divorced from ourselves for our entire lives.

One of the giant Federal Judges of our history addressed this problem. Learned Hand wrote: “Since our ancestors rose upon their hind legs to become Homo sapiens there have never been so many people who ate alike, slept alike, hated alike, loved alike, wore the same clothes and used the same furniture in the same houses, went to the same games and saw the same plays, read the same books and magazines, went to the same church and believed in the same God, and yet were all confidently assured that they were individuals and independent.”
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