Writings: Opening up your highway…to spirit & to your own heart

In the 1880s, the Canadian government was committed to crossing the country with the transcontinental railroad (CPR, or Canadian Pacific Railroad), which was finished in 1885. This connected the east with the west, at a price of many immigrant workers’ lives, much money in rushing the project, and occasional questionable assaults on First Nations’ rights and claims. Still, it was completed.

In the 1950s, US President Eisenhower proposed that country’s interstate highway system, linking the widespread land of seas & mountains & prairies with easy movement, similar to what the CPR had opened up 70 years earlier. Anyone who has travelled by car in the States knows how easy it is to get around, state-to-state, because of this.

In the spirit of that easy flow, Al Gore coined the expression “information superhighway” in the early 1990s for what has become the modern Internet. One more highway, one more way to connect people. You know how that one turned out.

So…the question I have:

If you had the resources & the political will (as these three projects did) to build the connections in you, what would you do? So often, we can conceptualize railroads & highways & connected computers, but can we begin scheming to connect the parts of our hearts, of our spirit, of the way we love, so that we are a whole, working together?

This is more of a challenge, partly because it takes a lot of work sometimes, and we are often motivated by the payoff. What’s the payoff here?

An open heart, an inspired soul, and the capacity to love, all of which make that other stuff look pretty trivial.

Let me know when your highway’s complete.

Loving you, the way I do –

Brother Ian