Review: 'Understand I exist, search for me, confront me if you dare.'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 3, 2014
Author Jackie Griffiths is a conundrum - no resume, no biographical data to help the reader understand her vantage, but searching the internet reveals the following statement: `Twenty years ago, when I was twenty-five, I had a crucial discussion with a friend about the meaning of life. He gave me a set of the Ten Ox Herding Pictures and asked me what I thought they were, and whereabouts I thought I might be on the path... I did my best to answer, and from that moment the pictures went into my psyche and stayed there. One day, I thought, I will write a book with ten chapters to describe the journey a young person makes in her search for meaning and purpose. One day I will know how to write it and what the content should be. For twenty years it seeped from my mind through my soul into the marrow of my bones, and then, last year, all of a sudden, I was ready. I sat down at my computer to write the chapter structure, which just came out of me almost without effort. Six months later the book was written and edited. `Ox Herding: A Secular Pilgrimage.' A description of the journey to find... what has never been lost. The adventures of Jae in ox herding land.'What follows in this book is an experience Griffiths calls `Shopping for answers  in the tent mall of belief'. She has created a fictional tale of a 33-year-old mother of a 5-year-old daughter Chloe who lives separately from her boyfriend Justin in her parent's house. Her closest friend had been her agnostic grandmother, but when her grandmother dies she leaves Jae an inheritance - some funds, and a note that states `Seek and ye shall find'. Jae seeks meaning, `she knows she has the potential to do, and be, so much more in life, but she has  become bogged down in the quicksand of averageness, slowly suffocating to death. Her life feels wasted, without point or purpose.' She longs for peace, clarity, and for the incessant questions to stop. `No career, no religion, living at home, no purpose.' Jae embarks on a journey - and in Griffiths' sensitive concept she is ox herding - the search for meaning, purpose and spirituality that does not result in the finding of God, or of any other type of external authority. Jae enters a realm where she encounters groups of people - Christians, Muslims, Buddhists (who share the four steps to enlightenment), Humanists, Atheists, Therapists, the transcendence of music, love, and ultimately that realization that the oneness of all things is that peace `in a place where all her doubts and questions are dissolved, a place without suffering or doubt, yet firmly located in the midst of ordinary life.'Griffiths obviously is deeply involved with music (her references to some of the great choral works find insertion frequently in her story), but more important she has written a story that is a light to guide the reader through our individual ox herding. Great literature this? No, but this book is a fascinating survey of `beliefs' and a warmly offered guide to invest in our own personal spirituality. Or as Jae comes to realize, `I am right back where I started, only now I have no questions at all.  I do what I need to do, say what I need to say...and the frogs continue to croak outside in the evening.  How much effort was needed for this!  From  the  very  beginning, at  the  most  basic  level, I  was  complete  and  perfect, lacking  nothing.  This  is  the  indisputable  truth, hiding  in  plain  view, obscured  by  its  utter  simplicity.  And  the  secret  beauty  is  that  this  perfection  can  only  be  revealed  through  personal  verification, during  the self-driven undertaking of secular pilgrimage,' Grady Harp, April 14