On the ignorance surrounding the treatment of a treasure

Dear friend,

I am writing this to express my deep sadness.

You have loaned your valuable treasure to people who have neither taste nor appreciation - people who do not understand what they hold in their hands, or the great value bestowed upon them. You have asked yourself if what you have given “is enough” for such people and thought more about what they would deem treasure than what undeniably and unquestionably is. There are some things that are and that do not need humanity’s approval or appreciation to be so. Gravity exists without you or I appreciating it. You are an invaluable treasure without anyone appreciating you or treating you so. I must express my utter pain and remorse that you have been such a careless keeper of the treasure which is your heart. It has been given to you with all the responsibility and weight of a masterpiece, like that which exists in the Louvre - and you have, on a whim, entrusted it to people just to see how they would treat it, or if they would appreciate it, without having the understanding or education to know what value it inherently has. You have let such people play with, examine, test, taunt, and finally damage what is not theirs and which they have no right apart from the right you have given them to use. And it is with sorrow that I watch them return it to you - marred and broken - to its keeper. Who are you to decide that those people have treated it “justly”? Who are you to respect these people and esteem them more highly than the treasure they have abused? And those who were simply not equipped to know how to care for such a treasure - or did not have the capacity to care for it. Yes, you have been foolish. But the treasure remains. And now you must learn how to care for it if it is to repair itself. Vet those who wish to see it. Watch their actions and their words and see if they respect life. Do they protect their own treasures, or lend them to strangers? Do they treat life with careless disdain? Then they will treat yours the same way. You have asked if what you have is enough rather than who is enough for what you have. Now I ask you to rise from your brokenness, self-pity and despair, for although they have comforted you this far, they will damage and snuff you out if you let them in any further. I ask you to educate yourself on what lies inside you. Learn yourself; memorize your verses; plough into your soil and bask in your light. And once you have done all these - have found yourself repaired through your growth, and wiser in your experience - open the door for the world to see the masterpiece within you. But let no-one touch it or go beyond the velvet rope - or even touch the glass box encasing it. These are there to protect it from the masses, to teach them to have a proper respect for what lies beyond - to look with greater appreciation for what lies there. And one day, there will be a face in the crowd. And they will have spent their entire lives reading about such a treasure, dreaming of the day they would encounter it for the first time, dreaming of caring for for such a masterpiece - practicing daily with their own and with others. And they will have a light in their eyes that is hope, and a gleam of quiet awe, respect, appreciation and vulnerability. All this time you would have stood beside your treasure on its pedestal, keenly watching for such a face in the crowds, for weeks, months, years. And I promise you, they will come. And when they do, let theirs be the only trembling hand to take yours and cross over the velvet rope, lift the key from your palm, unlock the glass case, and hold your treasure inside themselves for the rest of their lifetime.

Live

Why live your life for others? 

Live your life for an audience of one. 

Do what gives you pleasure; help people out of the kindness of your heart and not out of a sense of obligation or self-conscious duty.

Feel and accept your emotions - they are a part of your humanity. 

Embrace doubt and uncertainty; live boldly and courageously. 

Try happiness on a sad day.

What can you take from this life but memories and experiences?

Love wholeheartedly, give to the point you feel the tinge of sacrifice - stop denying yourself the joy of unrestrained kindness.

Do what you want, not what you think people expect from you.

Why remain in and smile at the past when you can live in and experience the present? 

Create and extend your parameters, develop the parts of yourself you want to blossom.

What excuse do you have to complain when you can do something about it?

Life is a ball, and it’s in your court. Stop throwing it to people, mistakes, and the past: do you want life or excuses?

Accept what happens. Move on. You are more than the sum total of your mistakes and achievements.

No one can help you more than yourself. Stop destroying yourself through your thought life.

Sometimes the most important people in your world are wrong about you. Don’t let them have the last say about who you are and what you’re destined for.

Your being here at all means that you are here for a reason. 

Experience yourself. Who are you? What do you like about you? This question cannot be answered with “nothing”. You were masterfully created by an artist. Do not deny his ability or craftsmanship.

Every person who has come into your life has taught you something and shaped the person you’ve become.

Nothing is more harmful than complacency. A step not taken is a step made backwards.

Die with memories, not dreams. 

You only have one life. It’s up to you to live it. In every mistake, there’s a lesson; in every humiliation, there’s a glowing badge of resilience; in every faltering step, there is more ground covered than had you not taken a step at all.

With a well-lived life comes responsibility. Take responsibility for what you let dictate your destiny.

Live, friend. LIVE. 

If this is all you have, why would you settle for less? 

The whole world is available to you! It needs to experience the unleashing of your power!

LIVE!

The Eye is Like the Dawn

 

An excerpt from Anam Cara by John O'Donohue

The first sense we will consider is the sense of sight or vision. The human eye is one place where the intensity of human presence becomes uniquely focused and available. The universe finds its deepest reflection and belonging in the human eye. I imagine the mountains dreaming of the coming of vision. The eye, when it opens, is like the dawn breaking in the night. When it opens, a new world is there. The eye is also the mother of distance. When the eye opens, it shows that others and the world are outside us, distant from us. The spur of tension that has enlivened all of Western philosophy is the desire to bring subject and object together. Perhaps it is the eye as mother of distance that splits the subject from the object. Yet infinity somehow invests our perception of every object. Joseph Brodsky points out, beautifully, that an object makes infinity private.

Yet, in a wonderful way, the eye as mother of distance makes us wonder at the mystery and otherness of everything outside us. In this sense, the eye is also the mother of intimacy, bringing everything close to us. When you really gaze at something, you bring it inside you. One could write a beautiful spirituality on the holiness of the gaze. The opposite of the gaze is the intrusive stare. When you are stared at, the eye of the Other becomes tyrannical. You have become the object of the Other’s stare in a humiliating, invasive and threatening way.

When you really look deeply at something, it becomes part of you. This is one of the sinister aspects of television. People are constantly looking at empty and false images; these impoverished images are filling up the inner world of the heart. The modern world of image and electronic media is reminiscent of Plato’s wonderful allegory of the cave. The prisoners are in one line, chained together, looking at the wall of the cave. The fire behind them casts images onto the wall. Looking at the wall of that cave, the prisoners believe it to be reality. Yet all they are seeing are shadows of reflections. Television and the computer world are great empty shadowlands. To look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision.

There are those who are physically blind; they have lived all their lives in a moonscape of darkness. They have never seen a wave, a stone, a star, a flower, the sky, or the face of another human being. Yet there are others with perfect vision who are absolutely blind. The Irish painter Tony O’Malley is a wonderful artist of the invisible; in an introduction to his work the English artist Patrick Heron said, ‘In contrast to most people, Tony O’Malley walks around with his eyes open.’

Many of us have mad our world so familiar that we do not see it any more. It is an interesting question to ask yourself at night: what did I really see this day? You could be surprised at what you did not see. Maybe your eyes were unconditioned reflexes operating automatically all day without any real mindfulness or recognition; while you looked out from yourself, you never gazed or really attended to anything. The field of vision is always complex and when your eyes look out, they cannot see everything. If you attempt a full field of vision, then it becomes unspecified and blurred; if you focus on one aspect of it, then you really see that, but you miss out on the larger picture. The human eye is always selecting what it wants to see and also evading what it does not want to see. The crucial question then is, what criteria do we use to decide what we like to see and to avoid seeing what we do not want to see? Many limited and negative lives issue directly from this narrowness of vision.

It is a startling truth that how you see and what you see determines how and who you will be. An interesting way of beginning to o some interior work is to explore your particular style of seeing. Ask yourself: what way do I behold the world? Through this question you will discover your specific pattern of seeing. There are many different styles of vision.

A Sense of Self

Hello all,

This blog has been rather dusty - thank you to a friend who nudged me into reviving it. :)

I am a poetry lover and my personal poetry has been lying dormant for some time.
I have decided to let it come out of hibernation, and share some with you.
Please share your thoughts, and send me some of your own poetry; I'm always hungry for more!
I hope this is of some interest or inspiration to you. :)

A Sense of Self

One day I woke up and I was happy

I was happy because I liked myself, just the way I was
And in that moment, no one else's opinion of me could change that.
And I imagined

Imagined
If everyone were to feel that way about themselves

Imagined
How much we could give to one another if we were ourselves...

We could give them the purity of our souls
And not a blurry imitation of what we think they want.

Letting those who dislike us
Dislike us for who we are
But letting those who love us
Love all of us, in our entirety.



A Higher Bar
 
I have decided to be faithful
Faithful to the person I ran from
The person I was ashamed of:

Faithful to me.

I have sneered at myself in reflective surfaces
Disdained my speech,
My thoughts

But now I let myself be;

I am not someone I approved of

But I am someone with approval stamped on me
Stamped by a greater hand

And now, out of respect for that hand

I must love what is loved
Unconditionally, for His is unconditional

Wake up to the fact that I did not make myself

And yes,
That I am the result of exposure and decisions.

Yet in this I am raised to a greater bar:

When I see that I am no longer just me

But someone's.

Have you read a Richard J Maybury book?

What is a Richard J Maybury book?

Richard J Maybury is the author of the “Uncle Eric” series. These brilliant books educate their readers on essential subjects such as economics, law systems, and world views. 

 

I highly recommend these books to everyone. If you are looking for quality, look no further.

What makes these books so appealing is their concise, easy-to-read style.  They are written as a series of letters between an uncle and nephew. 

Choosing not to read these is your loss! These books, when used practically, will build extremely successful people. 

Still not convinced?

The Uncle Eric series has tied for first place (in both 2011 and 2014) in the Government category of the 2014 Practical Homeschooling Reader Awards.

I hope you pick up one of these wonderful books. You will not be disappointed.

 For more information and rave reviews, look at these sites:

http://www.chaostan.com/books.html

http://www.bluestockingpress.com/index.html

The titles of the complete Uncle Eric series:

· Uncle Eric Talks About Personal, Career and Financial Security

· Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?

· Whatever Happened to Justice?

· Are You Liberal? Conservative? or Confused?

· Ancient Rome: How It Affects You Today

· Evaluating Books: What Would Thomas Jefferson Think About This?

· The Money Mystery: The Hidden Force Affecting Your Career, Business and Investments

· The Clipper Ship Strategy: For Success in Your Career, Business and Investments

· The Thousand Year War in the Mideast: How It Affects You Today 

· World War I: The Rest of the Story and How It Affects You Today

· World War II: The Rest of the Story & How It Affects You Today 

A Bit of Poetry to Inspire You

Poetry is so inspiring, isn't it?

It can give you the gift of an experience or emotion, just through letting your eyes run over a few words. Your mind does the rest. So much of it can be felt, and tasted, and yet not thoroughly comprehended or understood. That's the beauty of it.

Here are a few poems that have sparked my imagination recently. 

Your patience in reading them will definitely reward you!

Look at the Way the Sky Breaks Under Us by Emma Shi is so exquisitely beautiful it will carry you off in its arms...

I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.

Dulce et Decorum Est

By Wilfred Owen

NOTES: Latin phrase is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Look at the Way the Sky Breaks Under Us

Emma Shi

When the plane came down, it smashed right through my heart. I was pinned under the beautiful wing and you were running wild with the fire and I heard you screaming. You were screaming so, so loud, and I imagined your (black/blonde/brown) hair covered in ash. I imagined the fire melting your skin away where it would bleed into the earth, where the trees would then use the light in your wrists as food, and release it to be inhaled by some other person who has forgotten the color of flowers

(breath in, breath in, breath out).

I couldn’t see you but I felt you there, tugging at my strings, even thought there was this metal against my legs and it was burning, burning. Everything was burning and I almost choked on the fire like all the people before us who believed they were invincible.

And when they finally came for us, my legs were dead and all of you was broken. Your skin was melting into the soil, the trees grabbing at your light, their roots reaching for your cells to release them to the last of the butterflies, and I inhaled it and it tasted like the stars. It tasted like clear oceans and it collected like dust in my lungs and it stung against my tongue. It stung, it stung, it stung, (and

breathe in, breathe in, breath

out).

In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 54

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good

         Will be the final end of ill,

         To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;

         That not one life shall be destroy'd,

         Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;

         That not a moth with vain desire

         Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,

Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;

         I can but trust that good shall fall

         At last—far off—at last, to all,

And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?

         An infant crying in the night:

         An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.

To ----

Percy Bysshe Shelley

  

One word is too often profaned

      For me to profane it,

One feeling too falsely disdained

      For thee to disdain it;

One hope is too like despair

      For prudence to smother,

And pity from thee more dear

      Than that from another.

   I can give not what men call love,

      But wilt thou accept not

The worship the heart lifts above

      And the Heavens reject not,—

The desire of the moth for the star,

      Of the night for the morrow,

The devotion to something afar

      From the sphere of our sorrow?