Yesterday WordPress notified me I had just published my 500th post here at the Omphalos Cafe.

  ‘Really?’ I thought. That many? 

  With a little digging I saw that my first post was July 21, 2011, over fifteen years ago!

  Let’s see, I was forty-seven years old, married with one son and driving a truck full time for a rendering company. If you don’t know what that is it is essentially the glue factory. We picked up and recycled used cooking oil from the back of restaurants, scraps from tubs meat cutters would fill in supermarkets and butcher shops, offal in giant bins from slaughterhouses, dead livestock from ranches, feed lots and giant pig farms, and finally fallen horses from stables and private acreages. It was a dirty smelly job and I definitely saw my fair share of maggots and what’s more I didn’t actually mind doing it… except for the full time part that is. 

  Because I’ve always been a day dreamer, a heavy reader, and a ponderer. 

  Few are foolish enough to ask the so called ‘big questions.’ Fewer still choose or perhaps more accurately are chosen to make a Life of it. What is Life? Is there a God? What is going on today? Who are we? Why do I feel this sense of emptiness and hunger for something more? 

  Vasudeva the ferryman in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha explains it to Siddhartha in this way: 

  “I have taken thousands of people across and to all of them my river has been nothing but a hindrance on their journey. They have travelled for money and business, to weddings and on pilgrimages; the river has been in their way and the ferryman was there to take them quickly across the obstacle.” 

  And then he goes on: 

  “However, amongst the thousands there have been a few, four or five, to whom the river was not an obstacle. They have heard its voice and listened to it, and the river has become holy to them, as it has to me.” 

Well, fifteen years into this seemingly futile blogging journey I am in my early sixties, divorced, single, free from the necessity of ‘earning a living,’ and consider myself one of the happiest men alive. 

  Life Flows on, for myself, for my son, for you and for the larger world around us all. 

  WordPress informs me I have 510 followers, but the reality is that they are mostly legacy subscribers from many years ago. Few read this blog. And I couldn’t care less. It is my song and I’m singing it for you, “a little off-key” as Henry Miller puts it, but that’s alright with me. 

  If you are reading this now I thank you and hope in some small way you are getting something positive from it. 

  Life truly is a gift…

  And of course…

  Life is ALL there is….!