Where Lie You?
“I am that which can’t be named nor defined by a language. I am eternally more than any word and so are you.
Be and do from there.”
- Maida
where lie you?
Remembering the Innocence Within…
Ancient wisdom teaches that it is within where all the answers to our most pressing questions await, the path to true love and limitless courage. This genuinely is one of the most powerful secrets to a life well lived and thoroughly enjoyed. Alas! The world we reside in has misguided us to a chronic fixation on all that moves, manifests and appears on the physical plain outside, observed and confirmed with our senses. It is shaped by perceptions, expectations, efforts, agendas and energy of so many most definitely beyond our reach and control no matter who and where we are.
What a devastating and defeating predicament! Our sense of value, worthiness, possibilities and affection is to come from a place so thoroughly designed to fail and disappoint us. It is determined to persuade you and me that there is not enough to go around within or around us.
Beware of cynicism however, as it starts to rise in your heart. I am most sincerely not attempting to argue for its usefulness or cause. Cynicism tends to place us on a high horse of righteousness for a moment, into a victimhood the next. It is a compliment of flattery affectionately caressing our ego while starving our soul. Evidence can easily be found to support it, but it requires the repetition of judgement to sustain it. We all hunger to feel right and vindicated, don’t we? So we reach fast for rather superficial, though persuasive reasons to judge. They give us that easy fix, the erroneous feeling of victory. Yes, we are all hooked on judgement and blame, a soothing compress in a deep seat of perceived hopelessness in this world.
But hold on! The external world can be pleasing and it can profoundly move and inspire us, especially when we keep our hearts open to so much “splendor in the grass” in all we set our eyes on...When we do.
It is a choice you see… Perception is everything and your perceptions are influenced daily, hourly even! And guess what? You are not alone or isolated in this. Everyone we encounter has a perception shaped and influenced by their daily experiences as well as long term conditioning they may not even be aware of. Therefore, stop before taking anything personally. Frustrated people will tend to see flaws in everything while loving ones will focus on beauty and the positive. No judgement here. All of us have been the frustrated and the loving ones, often within the same day. Everyone truly is going through something we know nothing about and responds to the world through the prism of that experience. One day something may appear interesting, worthy of your time. The next, it is a disappointment. Discouraging news can deem it silly and pointless from where we stand at the moment. All of us go through these fluctuations and every one of them reveals itself persuasive, a carrier of a landscape we faithfully embrace as reality. So how you ask, can we reach and remain within a more hopeful and fruitful one?
Perhaps, we can try and turn to different repetitions? Abandon judgement for understanding and a lick of trust and faith? This world undoubtedly offers at least as impressive mountains of beauty, reasons to hope, include and share as we too often find in evidence to condemn. It is just as easy and more natural to our spirit to get on the high horse of love and compassion, a place from which we can really see one another - our many unique as well as shared wounds, our fears and all the reasons that have filled us with distrust, anger and contempt. It would be a start.
This does require a shift and our individual and collective will to make it. It’s worth remembering that we were created to survive through cooperation. Gone should be the season within which we must conform, abandon our dreams of freedom to be who we are in order to belong. Such belonging is a painful aspiration in hunger for acceptance and external validation of our worth and value. We do crave to belong, connect and have a home within something bigger than ourselves, often blind to the fact that we already do. We belong together.
Our individualistic tendencies born out of fierce fight to gain and preserve freedom to be, assert our value and place under the Sun just as we are, have worked. Perhaps too well. Now we find ourselves so pulled apart and away from one another, we have a world of strangers plugged into virtual reality, fiercely disconnected from themselves and each other. But we are here today, we have survived this far as species not because we worked alone but because we worked together.
Truly, we are witnessing a near collapse of our institutions once created in hope and desire for a more just society, ever expanding toward a better union and a home for all. Suffering and decay of our common home on this planet spreads deeper and wider every day. Her tears and distress continue to spill over more into our daily lives… We are not only cruel to one another and our home. It is nothing but a residual ash of burning cruelty we direct at ourselves. Every single segment and layer of our existence is calling us to look within and remember who we are.
There is a whole universe within each and every one of us and It is there that we recover our innocence, forgive all the ways and manners we have acquired in order to protect ourselves. They have armored us well but jailed our ability to extend compassion into a cell with no windows or sunlight. Armors have deflected the golden rays for too long and we need to let them in. Only then can our perceptions become pleasing and the world we see more inviting so we can once again belong together.
I wish to see you in your light and I hope you see me in mine from a high horse of forgiveness and love. We may fall and forget, but as one we will find our way back up. It is in the commitment to falling and returning that we seal the memory and create the world of true longevity and expansion. The innocence of a child within me yearns to embrace yours.
Shall we remember who we are?