I like adventuresome acupuncture.

When I treat in the student clinic, I first mark points on a patient’s body with a pen and have a supervisor check them for correct location before I can begin inserting needles. Some supervisors are more fastidious about point location than others; some are more exacting about needling technique than others. But by and large, the process of marking points, getting a supervisor to check them, then needling them has become somewhat rote. Once the points are decided upon, there’s not much spontaneity in it anymore.

Which is actually somewhat contrary to the spirit of acupuncture, in my opinion. The classics of Chinese medicine describe the superior physician as one who carefully monitors the the ebb and flow of qi at a point.

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I talk about the “sacred” a lot, but there’s one word that instinctively comes up when I hear that word:

Boring.

That’s right, boring. Quite honestly, I can think and write about the sacred, but when it comes to actually experiencing it, it is often a boring path. Why is that?

Actually, it’s not boring, if I can get into the flow. The problem is that our world does not place Spirit high on its list of priorities. If there is a choice between driving somewhere and slowly walking there, the drive always wins.

But the sacred lives in the small, still places, and the vast, open places. Our society lives in neither. We hurry, hurry, always skimming the surface of life, looking for something new and exciting to allow us to move even faster. Being so accustomed to this, no wonder that anything that expands the dimensions of life seems slow and boring by comparison. An ocean does not have the succinct, dynamic, one-directional flow that a river rapids does.

The distance is so great in terms of consciousness that it often takes deliberate, concerted effort to get from the ordinary to the nonordinary. Thus the proliferation of drugs: a shortcut to the sacred.

Lately, though, I have been thinking about ritual as a means to that end.

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As you can tell, I’m shuffling things around a bit, and changing the color scheme of this blog. I’m finally feeling tired of the dark colors. The kind of Mystery that hides in black colors is giving way to the Mystery that hides in the vastness of light. Whatever that means.

On a more practical level, a few times over the past few months, someone has mentioned how difficult it is to read white text on a black background — most recently, a review of my site over at Spiritual Blog Reviews noted this (thanks for the mention!). So I decided that maybe it was time for a change.

I’m not particularly good with graphics. Expect things to stay really simple.

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life describes Creation as an emanation of God through ten different types of consciousness (sephiroth), each one giving it a different twist, a different filter, each an essential expression of the whole, all the way from Infinite Void down to the tenth sephirah, Malkuth, which is the ordinary, everyday world of physical manifestation.

I kind of like the metaphor. It helps me to understand what I want in a place.

Over the last year, my wife and I are slowly trying to explore places to live and settle down, as the opportunity arises. Currently we’re visiting Arizona; last year we visited North Carolina. As we explore these places, something vague starts to stir. I realize that analyzing details of geography, climate, economic prospects, schools for children yet to be born, or even the presence of like-minded people, Peak Oil awareness, spiritual communities, and culture — none of these really capture what I’m looking for in a place. All of these are important, to be sure, but none of them does more than skim the essence of my desire.

Today it helped me to finally step back from the cogitating and just look, with wide-angle vision and felt-sense, at the whole struggle to find a sense of place. What I discovered is that the general idea has always been the same.

I want to manifest that which is sacred into my everyday life.

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I had a little test today.

I was walking outside the building of my acupuncture college with my classmate Anthony. The school is located in an office complex, and it shares a set of public bathrooms with a number of other businesses. Other people occasionally hang out near the bathrooms. That’s where we were headed.

A young woman and two men were chatting by the bathrooms. As we approached, I realized that the woman was talking about our school. We made eye contact and suddenly she started asking me about acupuncture, does it work, etc. And about the pulse. “Is it true that you can tell a lot about a person from the pulse?” she demanded.

What could I do? It’s why I came here, after all. “Yes!” I responded.

So I walked right into the trap. She stuck her wrist out and asked me to take her pulse.

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I’m getting older. In some ways I feel more satisfied. That core emptiness that used to drive me has been met by a spiritual tradition and a heart relationship, and I’ve given my commitment to both. It feels good.

And yet, the task of living has hardly begun. The central question that continues to dog me these days is: How do I live in the world?

I’m at that life stage where I must begin to consider how to survive, stay afloat, and thrive in the world in a more long-term sense — that is, to plan for a larger arc in life, rather than live year by year. I graduate from acupuncture school in a year and a half. Where will we live? And in what way? How will I conduct my practice, my career? Where and how will I raise my family?

How does a young couple at the sunset of the industrial age choose a meaningful way to survive and live into the future?

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