Keith Kenniff is just so good.  Enjoy.

I was recently reading an essay by Adyashanti called Authentic Inquiry.  It inspired me quite a lot, and the first two paragraphs are below (click here to read the essay in its entirety):

What is inquiry, really? This is a good question. And like most really good questions, it is very basic. Authentic inquiry is allowing yourself to care, to take on the weightless burden of caring. Everyone knows what it’s like to inquire out of intellectual interest—asking for the sake of asking or because you think you should. This is not caring. When you care about something, it gets inside of you. It gets inside the shell that keeps you from being affected or bothered, the shell that keeps anything really new from happening.

So in the beginning, to deeply inquire about anything, you have to care about it. You have to care enough to allow it to get inside that shell. What do you really care about? What pulls you into here and now, this minute? What is the most important thing to you? For real inquiry, it is important to be asking about something you sincerely care about. The question needs to be personal, not about a spiritual teaching or something that’s outside of your experience. It needs to be something that’s coming from the inside.

In light of the astounding political dysfunction and rancor in this country recently, I'd like to encourage each of us to take some time to consider what our most pressing personal inquiry (or inquiries) might be at the moment.  Perhaps it's time for each of us to devote more attention - with great care - to our individual inquiries.  In my "other" professional occupation, I've been dramatically impacted by the political goings-on of recent weeks, so I now have a much greater amount of time to devote to composing and recording music (music is my umbrella inquiry).  For this time, I am grateful.  Just because I live in a town that fosters such a gross amount of superficial and inauthentic hullabaloo doesn't mean my creative output need be plagued by such soul-crushing madness.  Let's get real, already.

This photo, by the way, is quite real and was taken at Old Rag mountain in Virginia on a recent hike.  Although slightly touched-up, this photo captures a totally authentic moment of serenity I shared with the mountain, and now with you.  It goes quite nicely with Song for Burton on my music page.