Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Have you noticed that there are fewer butterflies than there used to be? I am missing them.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Surely that’s what life was all about? Opening doors and peering through them–perhaps even finding the rose gardens there… (Colin Dexter, The Dead of Jericho)
The good murder mysteries — the ones that teach much about human nature and do not dwell graphically on gore and violence — can teach us much about the power of sadhana (yoga practice). The best mysteries are ones in which the protagonist teaches us by his or her investigation into the mystery that with careful, steady discipline, the application of well-developed technique and study, consistent effort, and an openness to trust intuition tempered by discrimination, we can reveal to ourselves the truth of the matter. The truth revealed is not just the identity, means, and motive of the murderer (mystery solved), but the knowledge of the extraordinariness of human being in all of its manifestations, both good and evil.
January 6 is yet another day so historic it warrants reflection and impetus to action on every anniversary. (That might be resting, by the way, if you spend much of your temporal, energetic, and emotional resources in the efforts to make change and ward off evil.)
One of the yoga practices is exercising discrimination and acting with discernment (viveka) in response to changes in the world, the human collective, and ourselves. Discernment requires learning and admitting to the difficult truths and learning from experts and innovators.
Meditation, contemplation, reflection, and being present to oneself is all very nice, but without study and discriminative participation in the collective, it starts being more like spiritual bypassing than not.
What are your thoughts on this day? How does staying present to the reality of it make you feel? How are you balancing taking care of yourself and participating in shifting the narrative?
It seems somewhat fitting that DC has been crippled today by the first significant snow storm in quite some time.
