“I had therefore to remove knowledge in order to make room for belief”—Immanuel Kant.

Today is an interesting day for me and for my family. It is my brother's birthday, for one thing. For another, my dad died exactly ten years ago today.

I wanted to do something to honor my dad, so I took one of my dogs, Freya, to the beach with me to perform a sort of prayer ritual. Since I have never actually performed any kind of prayer ritual, I felt compelled to bring a non-judgmental third party along; Freya very much fit the bill.

It was beautifully day--sunny and clear, but also way colder than South Carolina has any business being. Still, the cold was helpful because the beach was relatively deserted. Freya liked that fact because socializing is not her bag particularly. I liked it because it meant I could experiment with the prayer ritual without an audience.

We/I wrote my dad a message in the sand and christened it by running around it 12-15 times and singing.

Yes, I felt a little like Betty White's character in The Proposal, only with much less festive attire.

I have to say, it felt very refreshing and liberating.

Now, you may or may not be interested to know that this whole shabang was slightly out of character. For one thing, I have not historically been what anyone could deem "religious." I am very much still working out my feelings about religion. On my Facebook page, there is a question about religious beliefs, next to which I at one point wrote: “Hmmm…” As I stay in this question (been here for a while, let me tell you), I have been tempted to join a rather alluring sect about which a friend of mine recently told me: “the practicing skeptics.”

Although I suppose I have been an unofficial member of that club for some time now.

Lately, however, I have been reading more sprituality-driven books. Interestingly enough, the majority of the books on this topic that I have are not ones I bought for myself but ones that others have given to me as gifts or "suggested reading." The universe is telling me something, perhaps?

So maybe it is the books, maybe it is the yoga I have been doing for the past several months, maybe it is the fact that my brother, a spiritual life coach, has been visiting or that my friend Whitney solicited me to start a book club with her based on finding your spiritual path.


Or maybe it is the full moon or the oddly high volume of beets I have been eating lately. Who knows, really.

Whatever it is, it seems that I have been absorbing spiritual messages with a far more open minded and natural curiosity than ever before. This turn of events is is both unexpected and new for me.

I used to run from talk of spirituality or religion the way those people in Spain run from the bulls. And, not to get off topic, but that is another scenario that just screams "HELMET!" to me.

In short, I spent a long time refusing to believe in much of anything because I did not want to be disappointed. My left brain and my right brain wage a war on virtually any and all topics, and religion is quite often caught in the tug of war.


And generally, I am not a science-minded gal. But neat and tidy explanations for the vast well of possibility on which religion pontificates is quite appealing to me. Maybe in the same way that death frightens me, religion frightens me because there is always going to be a number of unequivocally unknown factors involved.

Also, as someone who feels irritated whenever I am called to defend my political stance, I feel it would be equally frustrating to have to defend a religious one—more so because the so-called facts are less concrete. But, as Kant so eloquently inferred, maybe there are times when knowledge crowds the space to the point of eliminating other possibilities.

And maybe religion is not what you know, but what you feel.

Today, on the beach, I felt free and yet connected at the same time. It was a good feeling.

So I do not know what this all means for me in terms of my beliefs or future plans to explore religion and sprituality, but I do know that dancing and singing on the beach alone is fun. And next time I might take a page from Betty White's book and wear a costume.