(Follow this link to see the January 2025 Priory Newsletter where this was recently published.)

The winter blooming camellias remind us that spring will come.

In my youth, I remember visiting my elderly great aunt who I loved dearly. On this particular visit, she had moved to a retirement home and she was at a phase of her life where her husband had died, she no longer had the capacity to do much in the way of work and her children and grandchildren were leading full lives of their own. I remember having the feeling that she was adrift. I had the feeling that she was somewhat desperate for a purpose.

Also, around this time, I was beginning to realize that, for my own health reasons, I was not going to be able to find a refuge for myself in my love of being in nature. And, also for health reasons, I began to see that my work with food and cooking, things which I greatly appreciated, were also not going to be able to be a comforting source of meaning and purpose. This, coupled with the early and ongoing experience that human relationships are inherently unstable, helped me to see that the outward things in which I could find meaning and purpose were not as reliable as I might like.

These were among the good reasons motivating me to develop an inward spiritual purpose that could see me through the times when my outward purpose or purposes would change, disappear or become unavailable.

There are questions we might ask ourselves: what is my purpose? Why am I here? We can find our outward sense of purpose in what we do for work, what we do for recreation, perhaps in our family lives. These can be excellent and necessary but when they fade or change, what then? When we can no longer do those things and we are still alive, what then?

For myself, it has been helpful to me to practice the Dharma right now in my life; it has been helpful in the “right now” of my life, all along the path of my life. Practicing the Dharma has offered me an inward purpose: how can I learn to transform my own suffering and give expression to the qualities of the Enlightened Mind in my outward life. Now, as I age and my health continues to decline, I only find myself grateful to have made the cultivation of my mind through practice the main purpose of my life.

To read more about this, here is an article entitled “Finding Our Spiritual Purpose.”