While on a walk, it occurred to me--

I don't care. I don't care whether I've got a $300,000 house. I don't care whether I've got a gas-guzzling monster SUV to show off to the neighbors. I don't care whether I've got twelve kids running around in the yard. I don't care whether I get a husband or a wife. Don't care whether I can buy expensive liquor, fancy show dogs, with people all at my beck and call to tend to my every silly whim.

All I need, all I want, is a sunny afternoon. A warm, sunny afternoon, the chance to stare up at the blue clear sky, feel the grass and dirt of the Earth between my bare feet, and feel the kiss of the breeze on my face. A chance to touch not only the Earth, but the world--to touch it and be touched, sweetly and gently, by the Spirit. There's nothing in any world like it. It's something that my soul cries for that can't be silenced with a DVD player, an iPod, and a Hummer. I want to touch things; I want to feel things that have been long forgotten or just ignored by others in the world.

I'd like to slow down and enjoy life while I'm here; I don't want to spend all of my time running around, then, when I'm seventy-something-years-old, find that I've got so much I've left unaccomplished and no time left in which to do accomplish it. Or that I lack the physical ability or I Can't Leave What I've Built Up Here or whatever.

I'd just like to be close to that Something beyond the world. I want to get to know that Something, without the unpleasant intrusion of bills bills kids car gas house payments time to go time to go gotta go gotta run run run... It's a simple thing that's so hard to get, and I'd like to enjoy wasting my time in trying to get to know it a bit closer before I don't have any time left to learn.

I want to make people smile. Fuck profits and dollar margins and stocks and bonds and Wall Street. I'd be just as happy standing on the street in Berkeley, making good-luck charms and telling jokes and playing a ukulele or something. I wouldn't care whether it got me a million dollars. I'd just want to see a sincere smile from a fellow human being. That'd be payment--more than enough for my taste, thank you.

Something real and Something that's just fleeting, like the White Stag of Lewis' stories... I'd like to catch up with it.

People say I'm stupid or silly for wanting to do it, that I should just give it up and resign myself to Mundane Reality--that I should and "must" abandon my dreams in order to live a "successful" life. Money isn't the measure of success. I can stand penniless on the seashore, feel the breeze on my skin, and be richer than any man in the world. And that's the kind of riches I'm after--that spiritual mansion, that place of comfort deep in the human soul, that Jesus and Company would talk about.

Something eternal and shining, yet fleeting and hard to catch... I'm gonna catch it!