Friday, October 27, 2017
Maintaining Balance in a Time of Troubles
Maintaining Balance in a Time of Troubles
No question about it, we are living in extremely perilous times, facing countless threats of many kinds that I will not list here in detail, since we all are very aware of what they are (environmental, political, financial, corruption and incompetence at the highest levels, needless war and conflict, and the list goes on.)
Some people have fallen into despair, and grieve constantly for what is happening as our external world seems to be falling apart.
Others resort to extreme anger and fulminate and seethe over the incredible challenges that are confronting us.
I think neither of these responses, if carried to the extreme, is going to get us through. Too much grieving leads to inaction. Too much anger unbalances us and we forget about the light that exists along with the shadow. We put ourselves in danger of becoming the mirror images of that which we oppose.
I think we should rather take refuge in the kind of balance that great leaders have always manifested. I think of Buddha, the exemplar of calm in the midst of disaster (and the world seems always to be besieged with disasters of various kinds); Gandhi, whose passive resistance won out in the end; and Rumi, whose family had fled before the invading forces and whose loss of Shams was irreparable, who yet composed some of the most transcendent and powerful poetry ever conceived.
We must in the midst of chaos nourish our souls in whatever way possible. We must, above all, do what I call "consider our friends as life jackets." We must go forth into the healing realms of nature to replenish our spirits. We must turn to art, our own and others, to maintain our connection with beauty and to remind us of the beauty of life itself. We must turn to action, when called for, but we must not forget that we are creatures of divine grace, that the Beloved Within is always there and will confirm her presence through love, which will, if properly expressed, even bring waves of ineffable bliss into our own bodies.
(Are we becoming angels, the divine human? Who knows? It may be happening, even now, as we go through this fire of transfiguration.)
We are not just creatures of the moment. We are spirits of eternity, beings on our way to become vessels of light, divine embodiments of the Great Love Force that created us and binds our world together.
Let us not forget who we are.
Namaste and blessings to all,
Dorothy Walters
October 27, 2017
(image from internet)
