Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun.—Kent Nerburn,
It is hard to believe this year is more than halfway over. It’s the thick of summer. All the feels of life feel even more extreme in the sweaty melt of the summer heat.
It’s been explosive. Traumatic. I see many of my friends on social media feeling forlorn, helpless in the face of the recent shooting tragedies in El Paso and Dayton. I have loved ones struggling to make rent or to find healthcare they need just to exist. Everyone seems frustrated that there is not enough time. I watch the extinction crisis play out in my garden when 5 out 5 monarchs died, one right before hatching from its chrysalis.
Many of us experience the ramifications of being alive at this place and at this time in our bodies. What we hold and what we resist becomes pain-inducing tension in our shoulders, backs, necks. We may make it through the day just fine only to crash hard into the heavy sleep of the abyss or to remain awake all night adrift.
Nonetheless, we persist. We do the work that needs to be done to subsist. I notice that we are each gifted with inherent resilience. I notice strength where none was thought to exist. I see it in voices that are able to say no when it’s no, and yes when it’s yes. I notice the changes that have come and gone with time, and those that stick.
Noticing is a powerful alchemical agent.
Self-observation brings man to the realization of the necessity of self-change. And in observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening. — G. I. Gurdjieff
