THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness

Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous

Cold mist stings my face beside the river. The smell of wet stone and cedar hangs in the air while snowmelt thunders through a narrow gorge. White water boils and twists beneath dark cliffs, hammering rocks polished smooth by centuries of current.

Below the cascading falls, salmon crowd a churning pool. Their slick backs flash pink silver beneath the foam as their tails slap violently on against the water. The river is alive with motion, noise, danger, and desperation.

Then I spot one suddenly launching skyward.

Its whole body explodes upward from the torrent in a glistening arc, twisting nearly fifteen feet into the air over the falls. Water sprays from its scales. Muscles strain wildly against gravity and current alike. For one suspended instant it seems almost as if it is flying.

Then gravity and the river hurl it back.

Smashing against the rocks, it disappears beneath the white foam, then emerges again below the falls—battered, but still alive.

Another leaps. And then another.

Some are swept away by the current. Some fall into the jaws of waiting predators. Others smash bloody against stone, then disappear beneath the rushing water. Yet a few succeed. They clear the falls and press farther upstream toward where their life first began.

*

Watching that struggle, I cannot help but wonder what invisible force summons them. I speculate that human nature and its course through turbulent history resemble our own salmon run.

No salmon debates philosophy or studies theology. Yet a mystery buried deeper than instinct pulls them against that raging current toward their origin.

As I look upon the long human journey through history—with its wars, empires, greed, inventions, cruelty, longings, loves and hates, and endless searching—mankind itself resembles that upstream salmon migration seeking to find itself.

We build civilizations, accumulate knowledge, split atoms, map galaxies, and devise machines of astonishing complexity, yet remain strangely uncertain why we exist at all. We possess consciousness, and yet remain detached from the Source that gave rise to it.

My own life pilgrimage seems inseparable from that gripping image: the salmon run.

For nearly ten years, I wandered through America, scarce of money, searching for God and the miraculous while drifting farther and farther from the ordinary, compliant life. Seasons of exhaustion, uncertainty, loneliness, hunger, humiliation, and inward conflict came often. At times, I felt like one of those battered fish thrown backward against the rocks by forces stronger than myself. Twice I escaped the predatory jaws of death.

The river current of modern life flows powerfully in the opposite direction—toward comfort, distraction, appetite, conformity, acquisition, and pleasure. To resist it can feel unnatural, crazy, even dangerous. Friends quietly disappear. Family members worry.

Society measures failure and success by standards that too often have little to do with the soul. Many times I questioned myself. Yet that Force deep within kept pointing upstream.

I could not fully explain it then. In fact, I still cannot fathom why that wild summons felt stronger than comfort, stronger than any worldly ambition, stronger than even my fears.

For the salmon, the struggle upstream ends in reproduction and the continuation of the bloodline. The journey is written into their flesh by the blind urgency of species survival.

But for human beings, the struggle seems to carry a different tone and longing.

Slowly I began to suspect that human life points beyond mere survival, status, pleasure, and worldly accomplishment. Beneath the noise and commotion of civilization, I sensed that invisible summons pulling me quietly against the strong current of modern existence.

The salmon return to the waters from which they first emerged. Human beings, I have come to realize, are also searching for their conceptual origin, though many scarcely recognize the longing for what it is—misconstruing it as wealth, status, and offspring.

That realization changed the meaning of my personal struggle. My hardships no longer appeared merely accidental or cruel. The inward journey through doubt, sacrifice, pain, loneliness, failure, and surrender began to resemble a meaningful ascent to recognition.

Christ’s words in the Gospel of Luke 15 took on deeper meaning for me:

“There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Not merely because so many automatically obey religious rules again, but because a lost soul, recognizing its true purpose here on Earth, finally turns homeward against all odds.

For the salmon, fulfillment lies in reproduction and genetic survival. For mankind, fulfillment lies in awakening to why consciousness was given to us at all—to finally come to know, recognize, appreciate, and love the eternal Source from which we arose. Perhaps Christ’s promise of everlasting life is the completion of that perilous journey upstream.

If you’d like more insights, visit RMDellOrfanoAuthor.com under the blog categoriy … Mysticism where conscience, culture, and spirit intersect.

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