The Call

Following our call may mean leaving our past behind us and walking through our fear to the unknown. To walk on despite all the pleas for us to come back is to know we are free from the clutches of guilt. When we are free from guilt and fear, love blooms – love of the truth. Now we will say what we have to say and do what we have to do; not out of anger, nor irresponsibility, but simply because we must.

The truth upsets things, brings down branches that were rotten on the tree, and dislodges stones whose foundations were already shaky. It sorts out the wheat from the chaff in our lives.

So when the wildness courses through our veins, we have no option but to leave conventional wisdom behind and head for the source – for the source of some holy river, the summit of a mountain, perhaps, but always to the source that is in the innermost heart. The door for this journey opens inward as well as outward, and the inner terrain is often more rugged than any outer wilderness.

We cannot plan for this sort of journey because the entire undertaking relies on the unreasonableness of faith. Faith is unreasonable because it rests on no tangible evidence. It is the faith in the truth that can burn through the mists of confusion, uncertainty, fear, and leave us revealed to ourselves, to a new voice that was in us all along.

This is the birth of a new self, one not conditioned by the past. This is the self who slips through the cracks of the ordinary mind when the sentry is looking the other way. If there is one word that can describe its voice, it’s the word AUTHENTIC. It will carry our own true taste, free of the flavor of anyone else.

In being true to that small voice within, we are being of service to others and to the world in the most profound way possible. We cannot know where that voice will take us, but we are affirming one of the deepest and most sobering truths of all: no one else can ever walk our journey for us. We alone can respond to our call.

Life’s Ironies

Sometimes life’s wake-up calls are the equivalent of being hit by a two-by-four. In my case, a long prison sentence has served this purpose. It’s the ultimate irony that I had to lose everything to find out what real wealth is, and I had to come to prison to learn how to be free.

Life’s cycles with its twists and turns often make it seem like we’re living many lifetimes within this one. Each step of the way, though, builds on the one before it. When nothing appears to help, I think of the stone cutter hammering away at a rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing on it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it splits in two. I know it was not that blow that did it, but the hundred that had gone before as well.

What we experience as ironies and paradoxes are, from a higher standpoint, the joyful play of Consciousness. The existence of this world with its endless multiplicity, its ceaseless variety, its wonder and beauty, is dependent on fundamental differences. After all, a world without these varying seasons would be intolerably dull; the mill of life requires some grist.

Life’s ironies are the result of continual changes taking place, and they can feel like a blessing or a curse, depending on our desires; the same rain welcomed by the flowers is mourned by picnickers wishing for a sunny day.

Doors open and close, energies rise and fall, and we are challenged to align our lives with the cycles of time and embrace each season for its own gifts. Each of us, in our own way, in our own time, is learning to open to the timeless unfolding of all the seasons of life.

George Washington Carver eloquently expressed this when he wrote, “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong because someday in life you will have been all of these.”