The Cultivation of Self

Whatever seed you sow in your spirit now will later become your 'call'. Put another way, your spirit calls you *now* to fulfill a promise or commitment you'd made earlier. All your calls were planted in you once upon a time. You may have been too small to even know or remember. You may have been a toddler. You may even have been in pre-eternity; which is to say, you were not even born. The 'call' was planted by an ancestor.

But this is not the only source of your call. Our Source runs deeper than our immediate person, family, or self. Sometimes the Root of the Root calls, and we hear its call traveling all the way up the tree of life, to the bud or branch that we are.
~

rn 

Sunday, December 02, 2012

Art by Vincent Van Gogh

Short Discourse: Virtue Is The Ground the Self Stands On

The physical body may walk on Earth, but the inner human walks on the floor of right deeds and character, increasingly cemented and matured. This inner construction forms the true and lasting story of our lives.

Likewise, the economies and societies of the world outside may be formed on ideals, aspirations and charters, but what really matters and manifests and 'lasts' (until it, too, passes) is the slow work of a careful and deliberate hand. Societies that have built their fabric up naturally and thoughtfully flourish. Other systems eventually burst and collapse. 

This is what I know to be Real.

~

rn

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

You Are The Map Of Your Life

If only you do what matters to you will your life ever be sensible. You are the map and scheme of what your life ought to be, and what it must look like. If you feel lost, angry, hazarded, dull, over-excited... you are going by someone else's instruction, someone else's map. (That 'someone else' can be the over-culture, or an idea.) When you live by your own code, above all, you feel comfortable with yourself. Even your trouble and strife makes sense.
~

rn 

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Build Your House With Love

When houses are built around anything other than intimacy and love, the result is an eventual collapse of the family's life. When building a house—or building of any kind—consider warmth, intimacy, love. Not pride, show, grandeur, or even pure artistic beauty.

How Life Gathers...

An elephant is not made all at once; it grows up from an embryo to a babe to an adult. 

A sea shell is not created in an instance. Layers upon layers of mineral gather, wrapping themselves up in a spiral.

And such is the case of all true human endeavor: it starts with an incredibly small but exquisite piece, complete unto itself, around which other pieces are gathered until a larger production begins to become apparent. Such as this Rose Window, from a medieval cathedral. 

Contemporary world, however, is fueled by delusions of grandeur. Education, especially higher education, is leading the young to believe that they can create and rule an entire world at once, without having to work through or build up their way step by step. (The ability to see the Whole, at once, is another matter—an ability granted to few in this world, with their job being to show others the full map. This path, though, has its own small steps—chiefly, constant submission to the song of the heart and the ability to found a firm character.)

So. Our world us teetering at the edge ecologically due to the inflated dreams and resultant consumption by people. The bubble, though, is bursting everywhere... and ahead lies of us a humble path. 

Millions of graduates, and billions of people brought up in entitlement—we are having, and are going to continue to have as long as we don't learn, a difficult time. We must learn from and return to the true path of Nature, which is as true for the human world as it is true for the animal, floral, or mineral world.

 

rn

Wednesday, December 05, 2013

Karachi, Pakistan

On Adversity -- a letter

Dear Adversity:
Thank you.

Thank you for keeping my side all those years that I had forgotten myself. Thank you for staying put, for holding onto my shoulders and for shaking to keep me awake. Thank you for keeping the flame of life lit in my heart for God knows that I had deemed to lose it. Thank you, Adversity, for making me cry. Thank you for keeping me tossing and turning in the night; for always reminding my soul never to petrify, never to give up or give in. Thank you, Adversity, for knowing my worth when I had lost all sense of it. 

Thank you. Thank you, Adversity, for frightening me. You made me fear the loss of all that is precious, and thus taught me what is precious. When I has dust in my hair and my feet were bare, you held my hand. When I lagged, you were the ruthless master, the teacher. You were the anti-dote to the drug of illusion. You did not say 'yes' to my oblivion, my obliteration. You were the opposite of all the loss. 

I hope you understand what I mean. Dear Adversity, you have stayed in the house of my being for long. Your stay may not have been comfortable, for I have not been a hospitable host -- but I suspect that you expect that in your line of business, your duty. You can only be who you are -- and you are an irksome presence, a thorn, a nuisance, a dread, an awakener, a tricky hint of the promise of all that is you are the opposite of. You are a friend. And, ultimately, you, too, are in service, in submission, merely doing your bidding. 

I wish you peace, Adversity. As you must prepare to leave me as an extended guest (oh, yes, I know you arrive when you are needed, whenever you are needed -- though I wonder if there is a space of peace beyond you, and if so, I intend to reach it), I wish you well. I wish you peace, I wish you honor, and I give you my respects. 

Thank you for having stayed. Thank you for keeping me alive. Thank you for being you. 

Amen!

.ramla
October 27, 2010 
2:27 am
Karachi, Pakistan

Guardians, Not Masters

Some tend to think that the houses and places they've built are their property, and everyone who lives and works there is their slave.

No.

The properties we have constructed have come about through a collision of circumstances that operated through us, and by operating through us, they made guardians, not masters or worriers-in-chief. When the place comes about, our task is its maintenance and nourishing, and keeping it such that it flourishes those who work and reside on it. We are not the masters of such people—we are their hosts, supervisors, guardians. The task of the supervisor is not to force or to control bodies, but to watch how things (people, situations) are developing; to organize things such as there's room for growth for that which is beneficial, and elimination/containment if the harmful; and prepare for the departure and exit of that which is outgrowing the place's limitation.

~
rn

Saturday
October 20, 2012