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the tenderness and openness that comes with recognizing the humanness and vulnerability that this sacred emptiness has chosen to express through these forms. Only in the presence of both the absolute and relative truths, the spiritual and mundane dimensions, can the deepest intimacy flourish.
STRAYING AWAY FROM HOME—AND RETURNING
    If you’ve never left home even for an instant, why do you appear to stray, forget who you really are, and struggle tofind your way back again? Believe it or not, this age-old question does not seem to have a satisfactory answer. “Holding a begging bowl, a man with amnesia knocks on his own door,” says the Indian poet Kabir.
    As children, we spend much of our time in a kind of perpetual openness and wonder, attuned to the magic and mystery that plays beneath the surface of life. Many people have intimations of their true nature in childhood—the sense of a benevolent presence guiding their life, a radiance that shines forth from all things, or a current of love that unites us all. In his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” William Wordsworth puts it well:
    There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
    The earth, and every common sight,
    To me did seem
    Apparell’d in celestial light,
    The glory and the freshness of a dream.
    But as he goes on to bemoan, we lose touch with this luminosity as we age and eventually realize that we can no longer recapture it.
    Whatever causes this wandering and ultimate return, it seems to be inevitable, like the journey of the prodigal son. Growing up in a consensus reality that emphasizes the individual, taught to believe we’re inadequate and need to “make something” of ourselves (whatever that could possibly mean), chastised for some behaviors (our shortcomings) and praised for others (our virtues), we lose touch with the expansiveness of being and end up believing that we’re thisseparate skin-bound little me, this fraction of the whole, that the world has encouraged us to be.
    Over time, we accumulate more and more beliefs, stories, and memories that shroud the radiance of being we experienced as children. The simple joy and boundless potential that comes with realizing “I am” gets burdened with a lifetime of acquired identities and characteristics, the limited parts we play in the drama of life: “I’m a parent, a sinner, a healer, a slow learner, a good friend, a failure, depressed, extroverted, attractive,” and so on. In other words, we forget who we really are and succumb to the way others see us until one day, perhaps, we have intimations of our immortality, our timeless spiritual nature, become seekers, and embark on the return journey home. “From my home in the hills, why did I roam?” laments singer/songwriter Jai Uttal. “To my home in the hills take me back.”

    Why do we have to lose touch with our spiritual
home? Why can’t we just remember who we are,
rather than going through the painful process of
straying and returning?
    Who knows? “Why” questions are the mind’s attempt to make sense of the incomprehensible. The only truly honest answer is, because that’s the way it is. Some traditions say that God is playing games with himself. What we do know is that just about everyone strays from his or her “home in the hills,” though there are rare individuals who never lose touchwith their divine nature through childhood and adulthood. Wordsworth says, “Our birth is a sleep and a forgetting,” and many sages agree that the mere act of being born in human form causes us to lose touch with who we are.

    But couldn’t we bring up children in such a way
that we could avoid this process?
    We can do our best to avoid imposing our ideas and beliefs on our children and give them plenty of room to be who they are, and of course, we can support them in their innocence, openness, and wonder. But eventually they will succumb to the intense cultural pressure to identify as a separate self. It seems to be inevitable, and