"There is a magic in each new beginning..." (Hesse) What must we bring to this initiation? How do we make a fresh start on this infinite path? There is a sense that whatever we might offer at the onset is of the old life, that tired old self we've dragged around all these years. But, after all, that is why we arrived at this mysterious point of new and unknown possibility: we ran out of games to play, discovered within us a pain and a longing that could no longer be buried or ignored. Or did we? Did we still not entertain the hope that somewhere in the jumble of all our days and ways there might be an answer, or at least a way to stagger on without having to face the bottomless pit of loneliness and despair?

"Abandon all hope you who enter by this gate ..." (Dante). Perhaps none of us could quite meet the ideal demand of perfect despair at the onset of our path; but no matter -- the Great Way knows already all our subterfuges and reservations. and in Its comassionate design accepts us as we are, even with our minimal awareness of our real condition, the hopelessness and futility of all our creaturely strategms.

The point is this: any real spiritual path is about truth -- discovering it, realizing it, and living it. In the beginning the truth is that we are in a real mess, and that mess is us. I am that which is messed up, lost, out of joint. The cause of all that is wrong in my life is me.

If I cannot even dimly perceive the disaster that I am, it is impossible to embark on the sometimes arduous (but ultimately rewarding) process of midwifing the birth of a new self. If I feel that I am pretty much O.K. as I am, I will never be motivated to do real spiritual work on myself --- which real work inevitably tears away the masks and illusions of my "O.K.ness".

"Admitted that my life was unmanageable, and that I, of myself, was powerless to change it." This is a free re-wording of step one of Alcoholics' Anonymous famous 12 Steps. This is done here by me without permission of that organization. I have no intention of trying to improve on these 12 Steps of AA; the test of more than fifty years and millions of transformed lives proves how marvelously they are adapted to the needs of those they were designed to serve. The intention here is rather to use these somewhat altered steps to call our attention to some universal spiritual realities. Nor is it intended that hese re-wordings be definitive or dogmatic and exact. My hope is to stimulate your own thinking and feeling about these ultimate matters ... and perhaps lure you on to an endless path of discovery. Please give me some response, some feedback; whether it be a poem about first steps, or just your own ideas and experiences. Maybe next month we will travel together a little further, take another step, or go deeper into our beginnings...

                                                      M.K.