I've pretty much healed up. Right after the last post I took a week of recovery rides and that seemed to make all the difference. Every so often there's a little tenderness but not too much pain. Hopefully I'll get a chance to do a full on training ride on the MTB bike this week to see how the rib handles that. I did a easy ride out at Dauset and handled it well. The only bad thing was seeing how badly the race had torn up the trails. Thet're still great to ride but seeing the leftovers from the ruts and such just made me sad. This weekend is the Helen race adn if the rain from the tropical system stays away I'll be throwing my hat into the ring for that.
I got a chance to see David Wilcox with my wife last Friday night and really enjoyed the show. He opened with several songs from some of his older albums and then worked his way into the new material from Vista. He told a great story from his family's trip around the country over the last year in a Gulfstream trailer and then played a couple of tunes written from that experience. One song was about the three wise men who followed the star to Bethlehem. David wondered if the star actually wasn't very bright the way it's usually protrayed in the storybooks. He wondered if the wise men were the only one's who followed because they trusted their hearts even if the sign wasn't some huge thing calling out to them. He wondered why so many others who saw the star didn't travel to see what it had to offer but stayed home. It was a great story and the song was perfect and while I listened to it I wondered abobut the meaning and message.
I think that in our self-centered society the easy meaning to take from this would be to say that we need to be able to strike out on some sort of journey or vision quest and leave all the things we have here behind to follow our "star". But what if those things are our children, our friends, our parents, our responsibilities? Maybe the physical journey to follow the star is the easy one; the simple response to a calling. I think of the Desert Fathers who went into the wilderness not as their journey but so that they could start their journey: a journey that took them deep inside themselves to find God who was closer to them than they were to themselves. The journey was one of an inner transformation towards humility and sacrifice instead of some quest for glory. Too often we think that to rise above whatever it is we have to shake off the shackles of our lives and in a sense I think that's always true. But the call may not be to travel long distances but instead to be faithful to those who depend on us. Instead, it may be to let go of a need to be noticed for our efforts by those around us and live lives of quiet integrity where we respect and even honor the dignity of others. In many ways, in a society that shouts and screams the importance of the individual while simultaneously devaluing people through rampant objectification, following such a path may be as revolutionary and as rare as setting out to follow a somewhat unremarkable star. I believe though that both journeys lead to the same place: the worship of a King with gifts that have unimaginable value.Thanks for Reading.
