About the Founder
  by Kurt Venables

   First, welcome to the site! I launched this online magazine and writers' community in 2003 to provide a forum where those who share my interest in modern spirituality can communicate with each other. I hope the kinds of things you find on these pages will ignite your passions or at least your curiosity.
                  

   I view spirituality as a journey within. We will search our inner world over until we find our home:

        We shall not cease from exploration
        And the end of all our exploring
        Will be to arrive where we started
        And know the place for the first time.
                           T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Biographical Information
   I live in rural Virginia with my wife and our two children. Southwest Virginia is beautiful country. It's a good, clean, wholesome place to live and raise a family. We really enjoy it here. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Juris Doctor. Besides writing about spirituality, I also enjoy weight training, wine festivals, and hiking in the great outdoors.

Gems in the Gravel
A Note from the Founder
Sometimes I feel like I’m traveling through life at a hundred miles an hour. Sometimes I feel that my life is like a glass sitting in the sink under a running faucet- overflowing as more stuff pours in. The pace of life today sometimes seems ridiculous. Maybe it’s always been this way. I don’t know. I can’t comment on the pace of life 100 years ago (or more). I have a wife and two kids. I work a full time job. In the past, I have gone to school at night. Add to all this a seemingly endless supply of tasks, like lawn mowing, home improvement, and Pee Wee sports. Of course, I also produce the Spirituality & Community web site. Sometimes it’s difficult to find time to step back and take a breath.

Yesterday was Saturday, and sandwiched between mowing the lawn and running out to pick up some dinner was a walk down to the end of our road with my little boy, Blaine. We live out in the country on a gravel road. It’s very quiet, there’s a lot of open space, and there’s only a couple houses past ours as you travel down to the end of the road. We recently bought a fish for Blaine’s room (a Beta). The poor thing was in a bowl that was almost completely empty. We were walking down the road to find some rocks to put in the bowl so that Rainbow (the fish) would feel more at home. We were looking for “gems”. We found white quartz crystals, black rocks marbled with different colors, yellow ones, and sparkling ones impregnated with shiny flecks.

Walking down the road with Blaine, I was struck by one of those flashes of recognition that sometimes happens. I was reminded that life is like that walk. While much of life is hard work, sacrifice, and a seemingly endless string of tasks, the good times and the special moments are what make it all worth it. And sometimes it takes work to find the “gems” in our lives. We need to work to overcome taking things for granted. We need to work to recognize the priorities in our lives- family, friends, health, passions, and, of course, spirituality. The things that if all else in our lives vanished, we would still be fulfilled, we would still be truly happy. Filling our hearts with the Light helps us to be mindful of the important things in life, for the Light sanctifies what might otherwise seem ordinary, like the tiny motes that glisten in a sunbeam- or like the gems picked out of the gravel by a little boy.

   -Kurt Venables (For more from me, see Spiritual Soup on the Home page)

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