Meditation Point – Repost

(Originally posted 5/28/2019 – new video below)

Spell~binding

A few weeks ago I found a path to a wonderful point just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. I decided to sit a spell.  The Fast-Life most people live could take a break at this point and do some good. They might breathe in, breathe out. And more.

I prefer to fill the mind when I meditate. To begin with, nothing complicated. Just simple & true. A little something to chew on. And be nourished by. A verse. A lyric. A sacred theme. A remembered prayer. Bring it in. Relax it out. And maybe more.

Today a sacred text about a promised future came to mind.

the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.


Youthful exuberance on the right. “Wait for the leaves, little guy.”

Some masters of meditation, Buddhists, Brahmin, and Taoists, teach us to go beyond thought and image, beyond the senses and the rational mind to meditate most deeply, and achieve higher consciousness. I’m not a meditation master but, respectfully, I have a different view.

For lo, the one who forms the mountains, creates the wind,
reveals his thoughts to mortals,…

Ah yes, that’s what I am, a master of mortality. Yet as I see His mountains. And feel His wind. And maybe, just maybe hear His voice. And, God help me, dare to think His immortal thoughts, thoughts about the promise of recovery, restoration, reunion, new creation, I burst into song too!

To do otherwise would be to miss the point. This beautiful, wonderful point.

***

A first principle of spirituality is this: we become like what we worship. Worshiping the Creator (not the creation) is how we become genuinely human. The Jewish-Christian story says we are created in God’s image. And are to be His image bearers. His angled mirrors. Reflecting who He is to the world. That’s a high calling. You seek significance? Believe this and you’ve found it. I believe at our best we are points of reflected light. (Not the source of light.) And together we may become luminous.

So it pays to sit a spell. Alone sometimes. Like here at Meditation Point. And also together, in sacred space. To worship. And recharge for the journey. Then more.

I think that is the divine path to enlightenment. The Way.

A master of meditation, Gautama Buddha, and his followers, made a significant undeniable contribution to world culture. But about this point they got it wrong. They do not believe the God of gods is the Creator. Or for that matter that creation is good. To them all existence—birth, decay, sickness, and death—is suffering. Nirvana, freedom from suffering, can only be achieved by a cessation of selfish craving. Which to them meant all craving. Achieving Nirvana required a thousand life times or more. Chained as we are to the wheel of rebirth.

Awareness of the restless suffering, impermanence and emptiness of human existence starts you on the path to spiritual liberation. (If you are a Buddhist.) Because of these Truths, Buddha and his followers seek Un-Creation. The ending of the self. Like a drop of water falling into the sea. It turns out Lord Buddha is also a master of extinction.

My religious tradition tells a different story. God through Christ, His Son, is destined to restore creation, putting an end to the suffering of His people, this planet, this Cosmos. Enlightened persons won’t dissolve into a glistening sea of universal sameness. No. God will make creation new again in all of its glorious, richly differentiated, kaleidoscopic, unity. (Suggestion: if you expect to wrap your brain around that last sentence it helps to be Trinitarian: which is to say, at the center of everything is Unity and Diversity coexisting, the One and the Many, Group and Individual equally valued, One God, Three Persons in Loving Community. At the heart of everything. Before there was any created thing. It helps.)

Our part in this story? We begin by thinking God’s thoughts after Him. For amazingly He may be known, not fully but truly, here and now. It begins with what we see and feel and hear and taste and smell. If we are attentive. If we sit a spell.

Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things that have been made.

That is the point of Meditation Point. To know our Creator. Worship. Recharge. And then, to make Him known. By, among other things, alleviating suffering where we can. A down payment of future reality.

Yes, Gautama Buddha, real suffering exists. I know it. More today than yesterday. Birds of prey swoop down into the valley below. Red in beak and claw. And the good creation groans. But the wind whispers that a new day on earth is coming when a great song will be sung, by an unlikely choir, and the trees young and old will clap wildly, as old hostilities and fears dissipate, and the wolf lies down with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6-9).

***

A day earlier the fifty mile per hour winds streaming across the valleys and hollers of Alleghany county would have pushed me off my perch. But today the wind was gentle. And the fresh green smell of spring lifted up from the valley below. You could almost taste it. Leaf and blade and bud and blossom cast a Spirit spell as I sat, saw, felt, breathed, remembered, listened, and worshiped.

***

Doughton Park – Meditation Point
August 17, 2023

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Doughton Park – Wildcat Rock

Basin Creek Cove & Caudill Cabin

Homestead

You are looking into Basin Creek Cove. The log cabin 1500 feet below was the home of Martin and Janie Caudill and their 14 children. Martin’s father, Harrison, who fathered 22 children, lived about a mile down the creek in the community of Basin Cove. The nearest settlement was 8 miles distant, reachable half by foot trail and half by road.

In 1916 a natural disaster brought tragedy to the Basin Cove community. Rain began falling one morning and continued through the night, by which time “whole half-acres just started sliding with timber ’til they hit the hollow.” The storm left three persons dead and many homes destroyed. The storm left three persons dead and many homes destroyed. The Basin Cove community never recovered.

Source: NPS


The Road to Wildcat Rock

More videos of Doughton Park
in the next few days.

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God’s Beauty

Brinegar Cabin & Billowy Biscuits

The Brinegar Cabin at Doughton Park is an unassuming little structure, a window into a bygone era, a time when life was simpler, and hard.


Brinegar Cabin, Doughton Park

Built by Martin Brinegar in the 1880’s over a three year span, it was made from chestnut logs, sturdy and unpretentious.  It’s a testament to his craftsmanship that the cabin still stands today, albeit with a bit of help from the National Park Service.

Martin and his wife, Caroline, raised their three children in the small cabin. Together they faced the unpredictable nature of the mountains.

Caroline was a woman of many talents. Not only did she manage the household and raise the children, but she was also an accomplished weaver. Visitors to the cabin today can still see her original loom, a contraption of wood and strings that looks more like a medieval torture device than a tool for making cloth. But under Caroline’s skilled hands, that loom was not just a tool; it was a lifeline, a means of survival. She augmented their income by gathering medicinal plants like bloodroot, snakeroot, and black cherry bark and selling them to nearby drug merchants.


Brinegar Garden, Doughton Park

The Brinegars were subsistence farmers, eking out a living from the rocky Appalachian soil. They grew corn, beans, and other staples, like flax and sorghum, and kept a few animals for milk and meat. Life was not easy, but it was honest. Every meal, every piece of cloth, every warm night by the fire was earned.

Today, the Brinegar Cabin stands as a testament to the resilience and ingenuity of the Appalachian people. It’s a place where you can step back in time, feel Martin’s rough-hewn handywork, and imagine the sound of Caroline’s loom or the smell of sorghum syrup on a billowy biscuit.

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Brinegar Cabin & Gardens, Doughton Park

More videos of Doughton Park
in the next few days.

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