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Show Having seen that ridiculous and glorious sign, who am I to imagine that Father was the only one among us to harbor the secret hope of founding a superior system of orphanages, or some other high aspiration? Who am I fco discount Father's dream as "only" a product of physical humanitarianism? What did John Bangle the lay preacher and trapper from the Ozarks yearn for in his lonely broodings before his open Bible? What have hermits and prophets sought in one sort of desert or another all the centuries? Surely, most of our days were spent desiring money from bumper crops of wheat, corn, beansi," alfalfa or through- sale of land. But I feel sure that even the most earth-bound bachelor trying to hang on until he ''patented" his homestead and sold his 320 acres for $10,000 (if he could), held the full range of high yearnings as well as low, at least the sparks of them. So an irony of Nada is this: we did not know, or did not fully recognize in even our most inspired hour, what we really sought, what the desert was best fitted to give us. The "Nothing" that Nada meant, the emptiness was the void that Far Eastern seers have divined: freedom to create in a spiritual sense. If we had glimpsed this, if only dimly, then a year or a decade or a month in our retreat at Nada might have been infinitely worthwhile. But let's look at it another way. What if only one of ten or one or one hundred of us homesteaders caught the gleam? He still could have provided there or elsewhere the element that makes one man on a ball club the "take charge guy" who spells the difference between going through the motions and aspiring for the top. I put it dully. The inspiration could have been higher. |