I was camped in the Canadian Rockies, my tent perched on the edge of the Athabasca River, "Old Man" Mountain to my north, Mt. Edith Cavell to my south.  I had been there for several weeks, hanging out with a number of other itinerant youths in search of the lost meaning of the now vanished Sixties.

     One of the group was a guitarist.  As we sat around the campfire one night, he played Bob Dylan's "Heaven's Door."  It fit:  though we were not expecting to see our earthly end any time soon, we were all looking for what this earthly existence meant, what being alive was all about, what we should think when, decades later, we took our last breath.
     We didn't want to still be knocking on heaven's door.  If there was to be darkness, we wouldn't want to see.

     Don't we all?  You may believe in heaven, you may reject the afterlife altogether.  You may be looking, you may think you have found your life meaning.  We all want hope, we all want meaning.  We all want to find what it means to live, to grasp the essence of beingness.

     And that's the point.  Absent our hope, we would not be human.  And absent a hope of more than what we now see, we would not be--really "be"--at all.