regenerate

Joy & Acceptance (Part 2)

An online friend of mine, James, shared these two wonderful excerpts with me. First:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame,
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. Nothing is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I love the line ‘Just keep going. Nothing is final.’ – it makes it easier to accept what I cannot understand and more importantly, to keep moving. Not frantically or out of fear, but to just keep watching as things unfold. Nothing is final – my evaluation of the past keeps constantly changing with whatever new understanding I gain in the present, and the present moment itself keeps changing.

Then there’s this:

“Pain in life is inevitable but suffering is not. Pain is what the world does to you, suffering is what you do to yourself. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”
- a commentary on the Noble Eightfold Path

I definitely agree with this. I’m learning to accept pain and negative thoughts as inevitable but most importantly I’m learning to let them go.

And I was just reading an excerpt from Rob Brezny’s ‘Pronoia’, when this really stood out to me:

“So I’m curious, my fellow creators. Since you and I are in charge of making a New Earth — not just breaking down the dying culture — where do we begin? What stories do we want at the heart of our experiments? What questions will be our oracles?

Here’s what I say: In the New Earth we’re creating, we will ridicule the cult of doom and gloom, and embrace the cause of zoom and boom. We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate; we will summon the brilliance to praise and create.

No matter how upside down it all may appear, we will have no fear, because we know this big secret: All of creation is conspiring to shower us with blessings. Life is crazily in love with us — brazenly and innocently in love with us.

The universe always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.”