Live Life

 “For I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”
-Bob Dylan (My Back Pages)

One must be sympathetic to the paradox that life in all its’ rich currents and textures affords us, as it asks but one thing and that is to say “yes” even with all its inescapable contradictions. However, this sympathy should not invoke sadness but a dance to the music of life’s riddles, as we draw compassion from the well of our being and are compassionate to all the ironical aspects that living in temporal time requires. Life is constantly being engaged with the dragon who looks awfully familiar when you look in the mirror.

To look at every experience in life before the mind breaks it down into physical properties, this is Illumination. The eyes of the heart seeing from the depths of the soul as one looks at a harvest moon in the night sky and for a brief second it’s not a body reflecting the sun’s light circling the earth, but a luminous magical sphere full of knowledge and beauty.

Can we learn to look at all of life from this point? This is the heart versus the mind. Instead of resolving this age-old tug of war, we should learn to live in both realms as they are closely related. Just as the heart is an object that pumps blood giving the body life, it can also break when love escapes our grasp, feels compassion and joy, or yes; experiences an epiphany at the sight of a sunset. And isn’t the mind not just a resource for the stored up knowledge of the brain but deciphers’ the codes of the heart, gives credibility to the symbols of the psyche and turns knowledge into wisdom when acted in conjunction with the heart. Are not all these descriptions true?

We can look at the world as a trap; something to get out of, hide from or we can look at it as play in which to learn, to live, to love, to cry, and to merge closer to a ubiquitous Source within the well of being through every laugh and every tear.

People who live in ways such as this, which moves them to eternal truths, without any probability of fame or monetary value are the ones that make sense of life, which gives definition to the rapture of living. To follow your reasons on the way, to embrace your mentors, makes you the seeker… the hero of your own play.

The roads we take in life are not without pain or lease resistance. But to lose everything is to gain yourself the good and bad of you. To bathe in that and then reconstruct like a newborn from the depth of wisdom we have learned along this path. This is innocence with awareness, redemption from our failures, and grace to feel the light. For you lose the outside to get within and then renew the passions that held you before but from the center. Now the inner being mirrors the outer being.

The experiences of yesterday are not the truth of today for truth is of the hour. Each day we have the potential to reincarnate and this can’t be accomplished if we are slaves of the past or the future. So we truly have the power to embrace the voice of the younger complimented with the trials of the hero, an enchanted forest of lessons, which the soul made ready for the correct moment of light and love.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is the meaning of life… I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive.
-Joseph Campbell

Notes: Ideas influenced by Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the Buddha.

©jc2017-9

*photo courtesy of Pixabay