A few weeks ago, I was hiking in the Sierra Nevada of California.  I try to go there every year.  This year, I met my youngest sister and we camped at the same campground at which we had camped as small children, many, many years ago, with our two other siblings and mother and father.  It was a stroll down memory lane.  A good one.

    Although we visited the same swimming holes and had some of the same ice cream at the same camp store, we took some hikes we had not done as children.  In one of them, we drove twelve miles down an unpaved road just to get to the trailhead.  From that point, we set out into some remarkably spectacular country.  We saw no one.  As we passed by a set of lakes many miles from the trailhead, we caught glimpses of the Sierra of yore, the bucolic stretches of rock, tundra, and sky that characterize its higher elevations.  It was good to be "home."

    Which is the point.  Nearly thirty years ago I heard a message about starting points and home.  We all have a starting point.  Sometimes it is one we remember, sometimes not.  Sometimes we have positive feelings about this point, other times, not nearly as much.  Divining the meaning of our beginnings is therefore difficult: we will never know why we began where and when we did.

    But isn't that the point?  We're born in a mystery, a mystery which we cannot begin, in this life, to unravel.  And that's fine.  How shallow would our lives be if we could reduce them to complete rationality!

    Thank goodness for the wonderment and imagination of an unfettered and personal universe.