I am  beginning to discover the spirituality of fish, which is, if course, a mirror and reflection of the spirituality in all of us.

I need a spiritual point of view.

I need, in the full transcendence of my own ego and my preoccupation with self,  to drop out of that limiting self-consciousness in simple and ordinary contemplation.

Somehow, the fish help me to get there, perhaps because they seem so un-self-conscious and un-preoccupied with anything but their own survival. Once in a while, they come face to face with their own reflection, and they seem contemplative.

They don’t think about everything they do, they just do it.

I believe a life without a quiet center easily becomes self-destructive, at least in my own life. Everywhere I look, every day on every kind of news, on all sides of conflicts, there is much action and little quiet centering or true reflection.

In our world, it is considered irrelevant  and weak not to act quickly and strongly.  Those who think rather than shout are pushed to the edges of life, mostly ignored, pushed aside by the shouters.

I am learning that I need a central point of stillness, a lonely place so that my life and actions are creative rather than destructive to me and others.

This is a goal I often fail to achieve, but I never stop trying to get there, and I sometimes succeed.

As in today, watching our new fish in our new fish tank. I need to go beyond psychology and so-called self-awareness into the center of my existence, my lonely place, where it is finally silent and always beautiful.

I love it there, it is a holy and healing space. It’s so curious, because my lonely place is never lonely. I have always been the most alone among the most people.

“In the morning,” a prophet wrote of a great priest, “he got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there.” Thomas Merton wrote of the “lonely place” where he went off to find God and follow his will.” That is where he found his purpose.

I go to my lonely place to find me, and follow my will. Isn’t it somehow the same thing?

In that place, I am  fine, I am accepted, I am as good as me. There, I have faith in myself, I need no approval from others, I can return to life and get on with the essential work of being connected to community.