In the beginning

Birth sends us from the calm of the womb where all is one, through a crushing moment where one becomes many. One becomes a maelstrom of light, burning bright, to sear the senses and imprint a world you can never touch in a searing brand upon the mind... another perception is born.

The light is accompanied by booming sounds. It is the rhythm of life that beats its tempo upon newly opened minds, as they reach out beyond their selves. Thus, our first cries are recognition of the overwhelming weight of the world as it bears down heavily upon us. This is another indefatigable truth of existence, that is, it is we who bear the weight of the universe that we inhabit. The universe does not bear us. This is why some of us struggle with living, we think it is the other way around. A symptom manifest of this thinking is a weakness that demands others are to blame for our pain.

Even long before we began to fear for the expectations of an existence that we must carry, we failed to learn until too late, that to drop even the smallest parts of the world is to retreat into madness. This is when fantasy and insanity offer the world’s weakest bearers a lighter burden.

Pain is the cauldron that shapes our life experience to make us either who we are or who we should like to be, because in a world where we can only touch our dreams, nothing good comes of what is offered pain free.

Our desire for love means nothing without first knowledge of heartbreak or loss. To be satisfied needs the compliment of hunger or an empty belly. Joy cannot come at the end of the rains, without the storm that before touches us with its errant pains. Adversity is life. To wish adversity away is the kind of madness that only the insane should pray for. Without adversity how can you know how strong you are, how can you know your true worth to those you treasure unless pain measures your strength?

In the beginning there was not light, light was only a metaphor. The reality is that in the beginning there was pain and its brightness imbues sight beyond sight to those who embrace it, or blindness to those that do not. For those that stand up in the face of adversity there is always great reward. To those who pray for the pain to be taken away there is sleep, a life of nothing but ordinary. The art of letting go teaches that we are all extraordinary beings and therefore all worthy of the rewards life has to offer, so it is incumbent upon us to arise from our slumber and be ... EXTRAORDINARY!