I do believe Mark Nepo’s “The Book of Awakening” landed in my lap perfectly timed.
Today’s read, which I did before arising, hit my heart with the force of beauty and truth that left me gasping. I had to re~read the opening lines multiple times, mostly because my brain/heart/mind froze with a simultaneously deep recognition and an implosion of beauty.
In the end, it is not enough to think that we know. We must live it. For only by living it can Love show it self as the greatest principle.
The way that heat allows the ice to thaw and irrigate the earth, so our capacity to embody what we know ~ our quite need to bring what lives within into accord with how we meet our days ~ this ancient act of integrity allows Love to show itself as the deepest sort of gravity.
This is how I have held integrity. I have not had the poets words to be able to describe this with such precision and beauty.
Bucky said that Love is metaphysical gravity.
Like many people I know, I have been searching for a purpose as to why I am here. Something clean and clear I can articulate. A deep yesness. The consistent thread has been integrity.
I know as well that this time is asking me to raise from within me something that has been dormant, something my fear has kept hidden. Indeed, the fear has been a form of distraction, not allowing me to see what lies underneath. The most authentic and truthful expression of who I am. What I am most called to do.
In reading Mark Nepo and David Whyte, two contemporary poets, I am now feeling into what that is, always a constant path of refinement.
In simple terms, to restore integrity to humanity.
At all levels, and in all domains.
Integrity of our heartfelt personal expression, integrity of our relationships, integrity of our operating systems~governance, financial, economic, of design, of our expression in the world, of our considering the whole in design….
And God knows we need this. We need me and others to step up and hold self, people, governments, business, to integrity.
It is no small task.
I am not an inventor, like Bucky, or an original thinker. I am, as Bucky would often say, and average person.
But I know at a cellular level, and with the ability to use senses we have not yet named, how to recognise integrity, or lack of. I know how to guide people to their most integrous self expression. I know when a business falls from integrity, or a person, usually, one little atrocity at a time.
And I know well the yearning of people to craft their life and work as an expression of that deep feeling within into how they express their days. To follow their bliss, as Joseph Campbell would often say.
For now, I shall rest in this…
Photo Credit: Hartwig HKD via Compfight
