Category Archives: Monthly Musings

Hope in Dark Times

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Sometimes the negative forces in our world seem so powerful they overwhelm our ability to see hope.  The promise of a peaceful, humane future seems unlikely.  Some think technology will lift us out of our despair and save us from our troubles, when technology is the problem, polluting and destroying nature and removing us further from our true nature, our souls.

That’s when it’s good to remember that truth and nature are stronger than human hubris and the forces of destruction.

Also good to remember is that truth resides within us, and as it courses through our true selves, it comforts and guides us, even through the darkest time.

When we are quiet, far from the noise and clamor of a troubled world, nature speaks to us in the silence … of its wonders.

In silence, in the darkest time, hope is born.

Who Do We Belong to?

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We belong to ourselves.  We must remember this if we are to be real and true—we belong to ourselves, to nature and to truth, not the limits of our upbringing.

Despite the common thinking of the world that argues we belong to our parents, our families, our culture and their values and traditions, this is not true.  We do not belong to limited people or systems that would confine our growth and damage our spirit.

We belong to ourselves and to universal principle and must leave the limits of our upbringing to live true.  But there is a struggle.

There is great pressure from our families and conventional thinking to stay behind and honor mother and father and their world no matter how limited, dysfunctional or cruel and it takes an unusually gifted soul to leave.  We were born into this world of our parents and our departure has a heartbreaking aspect to it, since it is hard to see the failures of our first loves, mother and father, and face the limits of our culture of origin.

Those who didn’t have the courage to leave will always resent those who did.    In fact those who stay behind will work hard to shame, guilt, withhold love and even shun those who escape the snares of a closed, cultist family system.  This is a sad and cruel manipulation.  Those who stay behind see those who leave as a threatening reminder of what they failed to do—become themselves, true people.  The free spirit of those who left reveals the closed prison of those who took the easier path of conformity and stayed behind.

But the troubling manipulations of the family to return to their world do not work.  Those who have tasted freedom and belong to life and its mystery do not return to the prison of safety and convention.  Rather these free spirits soar to higher realms of consciousness and wonder, unknown to the average.

Don’t Try So Hard — Just Be

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Answers will come, even to our most perplexing questions and frightening dilemmas, when we can get quiet enough to listen.

When I quiet down, when I settle into the depths of my being, when I stop trying to change the world to work for me and just become still and fully and truly me, then I can hear myself, hear truth, hear the rhythms of the universe of which I am a part.  In this quiet, the answers are revealed.

Out of this depth, I trust the flow of life and trust the path I’m on.  Even if adjustments are necessary and a new direction is revealed, I see that I am already on the right path in the deepest part of me just by asking my questions in silence.  I need to be still in order to recognize the subtle voice of truth.

I can only find the depth of my purpose when I stop pushing and scrambling for answers in the outer.  Then the flow of life and its intention for me will come through.  When quiet is achieved and the answers given, then I can turn to the outer world to find the resources needed to match my inner and deepest intention.  There is always a way when the answers are real.

There is a paradox however.  I must consciously do something to not try so hard.  To be still can take great effort ironically.  I must stop my anxious pushing and trust life enough to quiet down.  Stillness, in the presence of the world’s frightened and at times frightening cries for attention, takes great courage.  Stillness in the presence of life’s deceptive cures and distracting enticements takes great trust.  But being quiet in the presence of the troubled noise of the outer allows a place within me to ring true.  Then I can express myself in the world with great power and moral authority for the energy coming through me is not from reactive fear but from proactive universal principle.

When I have settled into the depths of myself, then nature, truth and love flow through the receptive medium of me and a new way opens.  I receive the guidance and answers that eluded me in the noise of the world.  Now I ring clear as a bell from the crystalline sanctity of the quiet and power that resides in the depth of me.