As I prepare to visit Gettysburg, PA I want to remember that fear causes biases, distortions and tends to not be honest, thus causing confusion and tension. Love, on the other hand, is honest and causes a release of tension and a feeling of clarity. I suspect that the monument that we are going to visit presents part of the story behind the civil war. However, like other "historical" accounts, it does not present the whole picture, the truth for everyone involved. As I approach the trip I want to remember what I call the "rainmaker ideal" "We have forgotten how to allow. The essence of the Rainmaker is that he knows how to allow. The Rainmaker walks in the middle of the road, neither held back by the past nor hurrying towards the future, neither lured to the right nor to the left, but allowing the past and the future, the outer world of the right and the inner images of the left all to play upon him while he attends, no more than attends, to the living moment in which these forces meet.
"In those rare moments when all the opposites meet within a man, good and also evil, light and also darkness, spirit and also body, brain and also heart, masculine focused consciousness and at the same time feminine diffuse awareness, wisdom of maturity and childlike wonder; when all are allowed and none displaces any other in the mind of a man, then that man, though he may utter no word is in an attitude of prayer. Whether he knows it or not his own receptive allowing will affect all those around him; rain will fall on the parched fields, and tears will turn bitter grief to flowering sorrow, while stricken children dry their eyes and laugh." (Claremont deCastillejo).
