Renewal Thirty-Three : The Last Page In The Book Of Wisdom Is A Mirror

Yesterday on my walk in the hills, I sat for awhile on a rock overlooking the valley below. The wind was rushing up the slope of the hills providing quite a force. I had to stand carefully on my perching rock.

I started thinking about power and clarity and how getting away from whatever constitutes our daily habits is important. For me, at that time, the hills, the rock, the wind, and the solitude represented those habit-breaking deeds.

The thoughts about power (the wind has that) lead me to wonder about how we misuse it. In looking back over my own life, I knew that many times I had not used power with much finesse. I knew that I had never been taught anything about it, I was just supposed to learn it implicitly from experience. But from my experience (a perceptual issue indeed) I learned that power is both necessary and dangerous. Mostly, I had avoided it, if I could. But I felt, on that rock, on that hill, facing the wind yesterday, that we had been doing a disservice to people, especially children, in not steeping them in the nuances of power–at least what we knew about it. It occurred to me that there was a specific dichotomy, in our particular culture anyway–we teach the use of power very differently depending upon gender.

What we seem to have are males that are busy using some variation of force whether it is physical, verbal, cognitive, political, religious, philosophical, or combinations to get what they want and we have females that are using so-called feminine-wiles to wrangle what they want. I realized that this is over-simplified and supposedly not a modern-day consideration. Nonetheless, men still seem to compete for position in the hierarchy and women, knowing better than to get into dogfights with alpha leaders, have to have a different approach to gain what they want. So, we might have different language nowadays, but we still seem to have the same basic direction. If this is basically true, the configuration is a recipe for trouble between genders, feminine-wiles versus male force, male force versus feminine-wiles.

Let’s skip the operational definitions for now, this is not meant to be a scholarly bit of work, merely an ongoing reflection. But let’s assume that we more or less know what we’re talking about. What are we doing? Both forms of power, brute force or feminine-wiles, are very threatening and not very nurturing, though they may both provide a sense of occasional comfort. With both, there is always something lurking in the background in every interaction. This is an interesting way to have relationships, it’s like talking pleasantly with someone who you know has a gun hidden somewhere and knows how to use it.

So what is there to do? I stopped on this rock on this hill in this wind because I come to these kind of places to ask questions every once in a while. So I asked about that and some other things that have been brewing in me. As has happened on occasion, especially of late, I got nothing but the rock, the hill, the wind, and me. Nothing, nada, zip.

As I was pondering it all (I just have to get something), I finally did “get” something–a question asked of me, “what did I want?” Here we go again–co-creation. I’m out here looking for a mini-vision and I get one all right, “what did I want?” How helpful was this?

Then it occurred to me, sometimes a vision quest may actually be questing for a vision. When we go on a vision quest, we are attempting to get past the barrier of our daily selves to open up our integrated selves to the universe so that we might receive information not ordinarily available to us.

Perhaps “it” is now hardly answering at all because “it” is about creating a vision more than discovering one (though we can discover ones that have already been created). I suppose it was always that way, but we needed all of the “external” steps to create the configuration within us that we are deserving. Even then we could get in the way on the actual quest.

Now it seems that we have to move from that kind of tedium, that kind of pedantic alchemy, to one in which we are creating a little faster. In such a place, it’s a little more obvious that we’ve been doing most of the creating all along.

So, we have to gather the power to create and cultivate the ability to not let our energy be so diffuse. But when we get that power, that focus, we cannot let the power be the quest, only the positive energy, the one that offers all and asks nothing more than to be shared. The power is only used for this. It is a sacred power and we cannot let it be contaminated, toxified, by our personal needs–needs that are focused more on consumption.

What if we consider that we have created a destiny prior to being born and that in our physical form we have to struggle to become clear and to “discover” that destiny (the drama of a vision quest would make that “discovery” a powerful imprint)?

Fine, then what if we created the destiny to remember that we can create a destiny while we’re in physical form? Then we are more dynamic. We can adjust that creative destiny as we go along, sort of like genetic engineering (though it will require lots of effort to remember the law of positive energy). So then, we will simultaneously “discover” what we originally created, and then we can tweak that “destiny” if we want to.

Perhaps, in this present point of evolution, that’s what there is to “discover.” In the silence, which is wonderful by contrast, but annoying as an all-the-time state, maybe we can “remember” that we made it all up anyway. As such, we can continue to so create.

So, what’s going to save us? Well, consider if we created the scenario to begin with, the entire “woe-is-me-I-have-to-struggle-to-overcome-this-incredible-pain-of-separation-and-longing-to-find-my-place” existence? Why would we do that?

Perhaps because it takes incredible emotion and drama to recall our creative powers when we so thoroughly occupy and embrace our density.

What a movie this has been. It has a bit of everything. We long to find ourselves, our mates, our companions, our place, our task and we look “outside” to “higher” powers for the answers. Pretty funny. Now, it seems, the “outside power” is answering back and we find it is us.

This is not new by any means, the old story that the last page in the book of wisdom is a mirror is but one example, and there are thousands of them in our stories. Now, it just may be time to remember that those stories are not just “out there,” they’re in us. We have the power and we possess the gifts, it is not so random and there is no chance unless we make it. And there is more than one of us creating. We’ve made the world, we’ve made our lives–if we’re not happy, let’s at least stop answering as though we’ve been put upon. In other words, we can save ourselves. The question is do we really want to, or are we just more comfortable waiting for Godot?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.