You can run, but...
I have an image of myself racing through the
corridors of time, fleeing something. Time, space, people, and events
keep rushing past. I keep flying them,
twisting and turning, looking for a dark place to hide.
I spin out and plunk myself down for awhile on some island
of relative peace. Just as I am catching my breath, an
earthquak, tidal wave, an epidemic, a war intervenes and I
am off again, running as fast as I can. There is no where to go
and no-one to see. Just the flight itself.
What am I fleeing? Who I am fleeing? I have no idea how to
escape it! I can't go any faster. I can't find better hiding places.
It pursues me. I feel its hot breath on my neck. I don't dare
look behind me. Please, please leave me alone.
Whoever you are. Can't you see I just want to be left alone?
Why can't you leave me alone? Whoever you are.
One day I found my courage and turned to face my dread
pursuer. It was only a small child!
I exclaimed in my amazement: "Why have you been following me
so long and so hard?!"
She said: "Only to tell you this:
Remember your waking and your dreaming.
Accept everything you experience. See your
obstacles and learn to remove them... and follow
your heart."
With that this wise child smiled tenderly at me and walked
away, singing a song. Over her shoulder se tossed me a key.
I turned the key over and over in my hand and at that moment I decided to stop running. But I must admit to you that I didn't truly understand what she had said to me.
Nevertheless, I stood my ground... or rather I sat. Right there, where the child had left me. I sat for what could have been a moment of a day. And as I sat, I began to see visions of what I had always hoped might one day be.
Tears were flowing upward from my throat: a fountain of losses, griefs and pains.
And then I could hear the echo of a steel trap poised to slam shut as it had so many times before. But this time the gentle loving light and the memory of the singing child gave me courage to continue on my way. For a season...
A little unhinged,
I squared my shoulders
and stood to face a new day.
And so, squared off and ready, I set out on a new and thoughtful, well-considered journey, slower of pace than my frenzied flight of yesteryear. I began to walk through my City looking for old familiar haunts, my friends and family, some tenuous connection with the past and some faint glowing hope for a golden future.
Perhaps, I thought, the answers to my questions, even the meaning of the key the child has flung at me, would miraculously appear in the very place I had tried to leave behind.
During this almost aimless wnadering, my brain never stopped concocting its reasons, plans and schemes, hammering away at me, day and night, full of its sorry excuses, its grandiose ideas. But still I thought I could take comfort in the familiar life that I had know before... couldn't I?
Dear friends, you may not be surprised at all to hear that it wasn't long before I had splintered into a million, million fragments of my former self. There was no such longed for comfort to be found in my City. I had looked behind the wizard's curtain and found a little gray man carefully pulling all the strings. Puppets all and the play a sham! My glorious vision, a distant memory of an opening heart, the biggest sham of all. Everyone and everything seemed as insubstantial as empty ghosts, and I, the very hungriest ghost of them all.
Every time I turned around my City, I bumped into some new piece of myself. Oops, there went Saint Joan, Saviour of the world. Someday they will know and love me. Ah, there goes Mouse Woman, the one who's afraid of her own shadow. Oh, there you are, you old Devil, the one who constantly carps and criticizes everything and everyone. I'm really sick of you! Then there's Robot Woman who puts her head down and follows the lastest series of tasks she has set for herself. No looking up now. And let us not forget Whiny One who can't figure out why things have to be so hard all the time.
Well, I guess you get the picture. A bit like one of Picasso's deconstructed masterpieces. An eye here, a nose there. A bit of jumble it seems to me right now. I'm not nearly as calm about this as I sound. I'm really in a state of panic over this fragmentation. I can't find anything to hold onto. These pieces just keep jumping around and slipping past me. I have no self to cling to, no one to use in social situations when I need a role to play, a person to be. None of these identities is adequeate for the ocassion.
Perhaps they all seem so negative because they are so incomplete
in themselves. They need something more to give them in life.They need to come together. And they need a bigger perspective. A little joie-de-vivre is most definitely in order!
I'm tired of these chilly pollar extremes,
full of fire one day
emply as ice the next.
I decided to look inside for the answers.
My dreams began to inform me. I listened to the wisdom of the
great sages of all the religions. I thought about my experiences in the
light of these truths.
I grew very tired of myself.
I grew very tired of my little self.
I am not this, not that, not the other.
The Christians say, go forth and be filled
with the Holy Spirit.
The Buddhists say your true nature is Clear Light.
There is something more than meets the eye.
Dive deeply below the surface of your life,
what will you find there?
Turn on your searchlight,
use your miner's helmet,
and dig through the debris of all your days.
Fear not - gold gleams within the darkness.
We are not this, not that, not the other.
