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Inside You Is A Place Called Home!
By
James Clayton Napier |
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"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us." — Joseph Campbell
— The Cornfield —
When I was a child I loved spring and late summer-into-early-fall.
These seasons were my invitation to walk the cornfield behind our house. It led from our house to the town cemetery situated at the top of a hill.
I would walk for hours each week across this wide open playground that never failed to ignite my imagination. The soft breezes that wafted across stalks of growing corn and tugged at my hair gave me such peace.
In the cornfield I could be alone. I could play with ideas, entertain a thousand breezy notions, let my eyes caress cloud formations in the sky, ask about and play out in imagination what my future might be.
My buddy Brownie, a cocker spaniel mix, was my constant companion.
“Brownie, want to go for a walk in the cornfield?” That’s all it took. She bolted to life, panting so hard with her eagerness to get going.
“Walk” and “Cornfield!” Those were Brownie’s most magical words.
— My Town —
Alger’s population then, as today, never exceeded 1,000 people. Alger, Ohio is a farming community.
Many parents of the kids I went to school with, like my own, drove to Lima, Ohio, to work in the factories. The salaries our parents made enabled us, their children, to live pretty good lives.
Our parents lived through the depression, when jobs were hard to find, when food was scarce and banks failing. My post-World War II generation schoolmates lived in homes our parents never dreamed they would make enough money to own some day.
Many of the people I knew in Alger had migrated from pockets of poverty in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. They found factory work in the industrial North which changed their financial fortunes.
Our lives were a “piece of cake” compared with the struggles our parents had survived. We Alger school kids were unaware of the appalling poverty in which our family trees were rooted.
Except for Friday and Saturday nights when the Alger Eagles basketball team played home games, times were quiet.
The most exciting other things I remember happening in Alger were the whistle that rang daily at noon, arrival of the mail truck downtown, and traveling revival meetings yearly held under big open tents.
And, on those special days alone with Brownie, I found an unsurpassed quiet and solitude in the cornfields, feeling the textures of the stalks of corn, tracing the threaded geometry of a dewy spider’s web, or hitting a baseball around with my bat, all the while dreaming… dreaming…dreaming…
— Harvesting Ideas —
In the fall, Bub Berry’s tractor would roar up and down the field, stirring up dust clouds.
On those days his tractor motor could be heard from morning well past dusk as Bub harvested his corn crop.
When he finished for the evening, I’d grab a flashlight and call Brownie.
”Brownie! Cornfield?”
And off we’d go.
The cornfield, in any season, was where I received my best ideas.
And when the wind kicked up, my mind was especially active.
Breezes from elsewhere, loaded with fanciful notions as well as down-to-earth ideas, swirled across that cornfield. A few entered my mind, left an impression — and then, after making their presence felt, swept outward, perhaps toward Dayton, Toledo, Columbus, or Lima.
Who knows how many other little boys and girls playing outside were inspired by these airy streams?
— Bundled Thoughts —
I loved reading books, but my cornfield forays with Brownie into the magical winds of ideas made me feel wiser than my age — wiser with what felt like my own thoughts, dreams, hopes, plans — not those of an author.
Walking home from school in the afternoon I could see other fields with farmers toiling under an orange autumn sun — harvesting, then bundling corn or wheat. It was then that an image of bundled fields of thought arose in my mind.
In high school we studied each subject separately: English, American History, Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, Music, Art, Shop, Spanish.
Under the roof of that state-accredited public institution, those subjects were never connected. No one showed us how they might be tied, woven, or bundled together. Each could be understood separately, each was taught in a different classroom, but there was no attempt to bring them together. There was no cross pollination of ideas.
That frustrated me.
I wanted the whole picture.
But the education system I knew wasn’t equipped to tie bundles of disparate ideas and concepts together.
Yes, each discipline was “true” in its own setting. But placed alongside, or within the framework of what I was learning in other classes, the “true” became “untrue” or “partially right” in light of an alternate picture.
To un-frustrate myself, I brought my own books to school. These were books on philosophy, religion, Shakespeare’s plays, even Mad magazine. Mad spoofed everything. Its lighthearted approach gave a much needed perspective beyond the “seriousness” classroom atmosphere of rote memorization…test…more tests…memorize… memorize…memorize…more tests…study for another test…pass…forget the material.
— Synthesis —
College was a like that also.
Each academic department walled itself in as if everyone had posted “No Admission” signs to other departments.
The right hand of Ancient History didn’t know what the left hand of Intercultural Communication was about, because the two couldn’t see themselves “related” or “connected.”
Synthesis, on the other hand, is seeing how all we know is bundled, interconnected, tied together to form a more inclusive picture of our universe, our place in it, and the future toward which we are inexorably headed.
Synthesis says, “Let’s see how all the individual pieces of this cosmological jigsaw puzzle fit together.
I suspect we’ll discover that although our origins are distant, we are related and members of One Family of Knowledge.”
— Greater Unity —
During my graduate work in Radio-TV-Film, a professor in our department told me, “It’s funny, James. Those of us on the faculty who teach communication skills to others have more disagreements among ourselves than you’ll ever imagine. Most of us don’t agree on anything. We argue and argue among ourselves, and we’re the ones teaching others conflict resolution!”
“How can the knowledge in their heads be so disconnected from their lives?” I wondered.
Professor M. wasn’t talking about healthy debate. He and his colleagues didn’t know how to resolve their interpersonal conflicts.
They could teach conflict resolution, but somehow conflict resolution didn’t connect to them personally.
They were aware of the literature and research studies, but emotionally weren’t prepared to, able to, or interested in, living what they taught.
The cornfield was real.
It wasn’t divorced from my life as were many of my high school and college courses.
There I could scoop out a clump of dirt, hold it in my hand and feel the vibrancy of its life-force.
In a mysterious fashion I could not explain, I knew the field, sky, wind, corn stalks, Brownie, myself, Bub Berry, his tractor, the graveyard at the top of the hill — our seemingly unrelated lives — were seamlessly part of something bigger than ourselves.
The fields allowed me to grasp that everything in the universe is connected, tied, bundled together.
Back then I intuitively knew we were all part of a greater unity.
— Eternal Principles —
Today when the pace of change is extraordinarily rapid, so much new knowledge is coming on the market we can hardly keep pace. Much of it is technical.
There have been phenomenal advances in medicine, cosmology, archaeology….everything.
We can now see how our very genes are sequenced. But we haven’t been shown LIFE.
While knowledge blurs past our senses at blinding speeds, it is essential to realize there are eternal principles which are a lighthouse to our souls.
We can count on them.
They are the steady, faithful, reliable friends.
They form the shape of the core of our being.
— The Voice —
September, 1987. Cait and I were living along the coast of Oregon. My day job was News Director of radio station in Newport.
Every evening Cait and I would enjoy dinner, talk for awhile before taking our nightly walk to the ocean to listen to the pounding waves and, on clear nights, witness a glittering array of stars.
We’d return home feeling we had plugged ourselves into a magical electrical outlet universe. The Pacific ocean will do that do you.
After returning home, I’d turn TV and watch classic Burns & Allen, Jack Benny, Laurel & Hardy on cable, then read for awhile, while Cait painted her signature abstracts.
Bedtime was usually around 1am.
One night, about three hours after retiring I awoke suddenly.
I sat upright in bed I heard a voice say, “Pursue the invisible threads.”
This wasn’t a dream. I was fully awake. My heart was pounding, keyed up from adrenalin surging throughout my body.
“‘Pursue the invisible threads.’ What does that mean?” I wondered.
I had never heard the phrase before. Never read it in a book. Never heard it used by anyone in conversation.
It baffled me.
I arose, picked up a notebook, a pen, and sat down at the kitchen table to reflect on and sort out what “Pursue the invisible threads” might mean.
The Voice that spoke — here’s another mystery to sort out — WHO spoke?
I don’t know.
The Voice that spoke was LOUD — not within me — yet Cait said she hadn’t heard a thing when I told her about it the next morning.
— Greater Web of Being —
Cait got more than she bargained for when she asked, “So how did you sleep last night?” (I’m capitalizing Voice only because I don’t have any more information about it now than I did then).
By the way, the notebook still exists and my handwriting gives away the fact I was in an agitated state as I began writing, although it smoothes out several pages later.
Years later “Pursue the invisible threads” still runs throughout my mind.
What might it possibly mean?
Here are a few thoughts I’d like to share with you:
This universe we live in is connected in a mysterious fashion we don’t possess the language skills or insight to fully describe.
We are, all of us, part of an indivisible fabric of reality. While we may seem separate from each other and we live distinct lives, at another deeper, more profound, more fundamental level we are inseparably linked.
Just as all knowledge in our information universe is part of a greater Unity, it separates itself so we can examine each knowledge strand.
We also are part of a web. This web is about ten-trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times larger than the spiders wove in my cornfield!
Each strand of this web vibrates as part of the whole and must be part of the whole to have any claim to existence.
In ways I cannot grasp, what I am writing tonight affects every other part of the web.
The same is true of you. Love others and the web vibrates as it was intended. Fly off the handle at someone and all other life forms and civilizations co-existing along each strand’s continuum will feel and be affected by that singular mood.
There is no getting around it, we are inextricably linked, cellularly and cosmically, to a Greater Web of Being.
— Awareness —
The cornfield I strolled through during my youth was a good teacher.
It enabled me realize totality is unified — even though we break it into pieces and cognitively slice it apart, in order to better understand it.
Subtract all that exists in the universe from itself and what are we left with?
The answer isn’t “zero,” because we still have a universe remaining. We can’t get rid of it that easily.
Who or what, then, might this universe be?
The original creative Force that set it all in motion!
All that has been known, all that we know now, all that will be known, currently exists on each strand or filament of the web.
The truly exciting thing I’ve come to see is that it is our AWARENESS — where we place our beam of attention — that vibrates each strand of this dimensionally larger web.
— Possibilities —
The day will come when it will no longer be necessary to pursue the invisible threads.
We will see directly through the fabric of Reality (the vast invisible universal spider’s web of meaning) and realize we are One with all that exists and, similarly, IT IS ONE WITH US! We were not as “separate” and “alone” as we thought we were.
Today the phrase “world wide web” is referred to so routinely, I hope we don’t lose our magical connection to profounder realities including “connectedness” to the mysterious pulse of a living (and yes), breathing, universe.
May we remember we are members of a spiritual family, bundled together in a LIFE which transcends our biological roots.
Aldous Huxley wrote, “It [the game of life] is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.”
We have yet to meet the Player on the other side.
The player is hidden from us. But to play the game presupposes that both of us are somehow in “instantaneous” communication!
We are situated in the center of a cosmic web of possibilities and each filament is affected by our slightest mental or emotional act. Our physical life is only a surface thread along which we appear to travel.
The key word is “appear,” because there are an uncountable number of threads both above and below our own.
We are all part of an inconceivably miraculous network.
How subtle are the threads that wove the cloth of our lives with threads drawn directly from our Soul!
Yes, we are pinpoints of awareness in linear time, but are also multi-dimensional beings active simultaneously in both time and non-time.
Our spirit is non-local, but it leaves behind a fingerprint that looks like an “egg” of circulating delicate energy fibers called our body.
Endowed with creative powers to manage our images, intent, beliefs, and self-talk create a psychic force that is projected out ahead of us.
Each image, intent, and belief vibrates particular filaments of the multiversal web and by doing so we twirl our thoughts into emotional convictions that create a future of exciting possibilities.
Each of us is a child of the universe born to “connect” with a larger family of helpers. Why should you try to do this work all alone when numerous hands are outstretched to aid and assist your endeavors?
As part of a seamless totality, see yourself at the center of a web of boundless flux stabilized only by the projecting powers of awareness.
When you need something make your request known, then wait for answers to drift in on the web from a dimensionless realm of spirit.
This spiritually mature approach to life will enable you to live from, rather than pursue, the invisible threads. It is a magical, magical way to live!
Now, when I revisit Alger, Ohio, in my imagination, I see the cornfields and Brownie and myself — in the only place on earth, after living in nearly twenty different US states (that’s what a career in broadcasting will do for you), I ever felt I truly BELONGED.
Each night, before bedtime I close my eyes, if only for a few minutes, and I am young again.
Inside each of us is a place called HOME!
*****
James Clayton Napier was on television in Texas for thirteen years. He's been a news anchor, talk show host, and feature story broadcaster. James also taught news broadcasting, writing, and speech at three universities.
Permission to reprint or use this article is available by contacting the author: jamesclaytonnapier.com or http://www.astro-earth-relocation
Author's Bio
*****
James Clayton Napier was on television in Texas for thirteen years. He's been a news anchor, talk show host, and feature story broadcaster. James also taught news broadcasting, writing, and speech at three universities.
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