Brother Antoine,
While we are lost in our daily lives, which leave little room for a spiritual path or even for belief in God, men in hermitages or caves still live the slowness of nature and the light of the spirit.
These men, connected to the sublime and to mother nature, bear witness that life can be seen differently, and that mother nature waits patiently for us to awaken to something other than the personal worries of our little lives.
Brother Antoine is one of these men, whom we may come across beside a tree or a rock, in the reality of his spirituality and his beauty.
Often our inner agitation does not even allow us to "meet" these simple, stripped back people; we cling to our certainties, our ideas, the mental concept of our world. So we walk on, thinking we have just met an eccentric, a lost soul, but the real lost soul is us.
Another enigmatic figure speaks of this, the strength of our certainties in daily life: Castaneda's Master, Don Juan, says this:
We never get the chance to go beyond the level of mere concern, because since time immemorial everyday affairs have lulled us like a lullaby.
It is only when our lives are almost over that our inherited concern about destiny begins to take a different turn.
It begins to lead us through the fog of everyday affairs.
Unfortunately, this awakening always comes hand in hand with the loss of energy due to age, at a time when we no longer have the strength to turn our concern into a pragmatic and positive discovery.
Then all that is left is a shapeless, icy anguish, a longing for something indescribable, and simple anger at not having obtained it.
I believe we can meditate on this to make something of our lives that is quite different from what we think...
Brother Antoine left this world on 22 October 2021...
Enjoy discovering him!