Coin Worth

When we walk across a coin on the market place ground we rarely think of the many options that could have led to its falling so far from its previous owner. A torn pocket, angry owner, theft attempt and many others could be some of the reasons as to why a coin of any value would belong to no one at any point.

Value is lost all the time, some thrown away, some dropped like that coin, corroded over time or even simply discarded by those that once held it. When any value is to be lost, the assumption is that those that have lost it have little knowledge of its worth even when they allege that they examined all corners and there was no worth left for them.

Broken Cisterns:

 When we encounter a person that boasts knowledge and yet that knowledge has not benefited them, we are safe to say that even when there is value in that knowledge, by viewing it in a certain way, that value remains hidden. Many people will go to great lengths to create an atmosphere that exempts them from certain responsibilities, they will define reality differently and they will assume that change will come thus.

What often needs to be done is a constant abstinence from twisting the facts to suit our current needs. What is needed is the courage to face ourselves for who we truly are especially when we have fallen from where we once gloried. When we know as we ought to know, then there is hope that we shall get better.

True worth is not in what we know, but in how accurate we know it. It should never be the case that the knowledge we have created for ourselves is in fact a lie whose mission is to keep us safely blind to the reality.

Empty Vases:

There are some of us that have chosen to hide behind shadows. It seems to be the trend today that we should seek to find our true worth out there and never pause to look within, to find if our deeds are not efforts to blind us from what we have become.

 When we refuse to help ourselves get better and assume that by devoting to a worthy cause or by portraying the picture of a good person, what lies deep within will be cleansed, we only lie to ourselves. What life can touch another when it has failed to be touched or to allow itself to be touched?

When we choose to ignore this responsibility to ourselves, we shall soon realize that while we sought to free others; we enslaved them to our own emptiness and yet did not aid ourselves.

There is an order to everything and that includes living. Our first responsibility is to ourselves because the more we realize our worth the easier it will be for us to realize and even enhance that of others. We could hide behind warm hugs when our hearts are cold or we could find a way to connect and correct our hearts.

Mashed Potatoes:

Life will have all its seasons attended to and none of us can surely guard against those seasons we detest or attract only those seasons we adore. It will come to all of us. The task at hand is to determine what positions we shall take during each season.

Tough decisions will have to be made as to what kind of people we shall choose to be in both the good and bad times. We have to set our hearts not to be scared by the rough seasons and not to be blinded by the great seasons. We have all met hurting people whose hurt was so deep and hidden they would be hurt by a complement because that is who they are, hurting.

True worth is not in where we are but in who we are in all life’s seasons. We shall realize that the power remains in us to define ourselves even at our lowest, even when society brands us as defeated. When we take hurt to heart, we shall soon realize that our walk will increasingly become hard and difficult.

Bitter Herbs:

The power of any medicine is not in its taste, but in its contents. When we choose to treat any loss of value, we choose to find those ingredients that will make up for what we have lost. We shall not set our gaze on what does not heal but on what we so desperately need. Courage will be needed if we are to walk through this treatment to our point of restoration, a willingness to abandon whatever sugar coats or shadows that have kept us worthless company.

The humbling realization of our fall must be made if we are to take the herbs with the purpose and diligence due.

We all want to spread our hands in the air of freedom and fly but we all need to realize that the engine is in the heart. When it’s broken, empty, mashed or simply imprisoned, there is really no need to spread those wings because we shall not soar.

We need to let every herb complete its work in us; we need to realize our true worth if we are to keep ourselves.

Things That Matter

Holding Hands

There is an invisible string that goes through our communities knitting one home to another and building a sort of oneness that is meant to guard us against the isolation that would otherwise enslave us all. However, and sadly too, we seem to be bent to ignoring the strength and power of this chain, we seem determined to live outside the binding of this chain so that we can live as we truly want. We were once societal beings, but now we have replaced society with individualism. We work close to strangers with whom we share laughter and so much joy and yet this great sharing never brings us to the point when we want to belong together. Our retreat is to ourselves in the comfort of what we have managed to hide from everyone else. We come from families where our goals never meet and where the lead of a single individual is long forgotten. But how will we build if our inclination is to go off and do our own? 

Embracing

So much can be taken from a short moment of warmth and closeness, so much can be given. When we dig into our hearts we are sure to find the readiness to spread out and catch something, to do something not for ourselves but for the good of another. We seem ready to receive and be received and yet we numb that readiness, we hold our hands across our chests as if to fend everything else off, as if to keep something so strongly inside. We could argue that once we shared ourselves and we were not well received or we did not receive a thing in return and in that argument we would have ignored the truth. Hearts shared are hearts multiplied, and if the price for that multiplication is a scar, a bruise, or even a wound so be it. 

Dancing:

Swaying trees speak of a freedom that lets one move without setting them off their foundations. Its as if the trees free themselves in the wind and yet they hold fast to that which makes them what they are and because they do not let go of their roots, they become stronger beings.  When we think of new ventures, we simultaneously think of the danger that will come of them, when we interact with a new person we immediately asses the cost of what may be a friendship. But even more painful is that by weighing the worth of anything only in terms of costs, we rob it of the beauty that is in it in terms of gain, the gain we may add to it and what it may add to us. Our feet in many cases are firm where they are but that is all, they never move us anywhere new and we have grown accustomed to that. When we experience another attempting the dance, we frown greatly and immediately stretch our hands to stop them. 

These things matter.

To Become One

When we first set out on our journey we follow no other previously written script but that which leads us from within, we are not in pursuit of what is out there but of what is in us. It’s as if we are moving to a destiny that is already on the inside, as if we are waiting to manifest who we are and to be manifested in the same. We can nicely call this the zone of freedom or liberty. 

This does not last long however, we soon realize that those that have gone before us have a nicely edited script by which most of life’s tragedies will be avoided and success will be largely guaranteed. It is not up to us to choose which script to follow; they have already decided that theirs is the best and that we should follow it with no reserve. We are not accustomed to stopping and asking if what we are presented with or presenting is the right way, we do not even want to question our intelligence. 

We are constantly in the presence of souls that need liberation; they desperately seek freedom from the prisoners we have made them. New associations are formed daily and the associates are often people wondering if they have made the right choice, they seek for themselves in every decision they make. They give of themselves in the hope that their giving will manifest who they are, that it will usher them into this new freedom that was once theirs. 

We have succeeded at separating who we are from what we do, we have managed to place our hearts in places where our being has no business existing and yet we have accepted this way. And sad as this may be, we never stop to ask how the prison started living in the free park or how the prisoner and the free man began this painful union. What is easy has taken the place of what is right; who we are has slowly and completely been replaced by who we have to be. And because we have given up on the fight for ourselves, we have devoted good energy to imprisoning others, binding them with the cords of convention and norms that have managed to hold us captive. 

Yes, it’s easy to stop mourning what is lost, even easier not to mourn for it because we never knew when it died in us, but should we live this way, were we designed to be imprisoning being? The most formidable human relations are liberating in themselves. In all of us is born a river and that river has a direction. We are invited to help steer it in its direction and not block it or redirect it. But it takes deep commitment and devotion to see this and to do it. Because we have developed a special skill of hiding ourselves and wading everyone off it will take the devotion of another to discover us, to free us and to help us safely get to our freedom.

Our devotion has been to ourselves, to hide ourselves and help many more get hidden and never manifest. And perhaps now is the time to set others free, to help them be free, to let them know that like us, they were born to be themselves and not separate compartments in one.

Wet Surface

We are thinking beings and even the most mindless deeds or decisions have had thoughts birthing them. Whether we feed on our thoughts or our thoughts feed on us is a complicated question. But we are also loving beings, whether its love for things, deeds, people or even self, we remain loving beings. 

There are days in our lives when our love and our thoughts are at conflict, when in order to love we have to endure endless pain, or in order to be loved we have to forego those parts and elements of who we are that we treasure the most. When we think of where we are and where we want to be, when we contrast the reward against the sacrifice, the thoughts instruct us on a different path from that of our hearts. 

Human commitments are one place that our thoughts and our hearts have been tested greatly and with many failures. We have witnessed many give their devotion away only to discover that the place to which they have invested such strength is the very weight that will crush and grind them. When we hold ourselves out to another we often come with promise that its not about us or even them but that its about us, when we first get a job, we know that we want to give it our best and learn as much as we can and be the best they have never had. But then something strange happens, we begin to realize that no matter how much we think we want to devote to the job, we will never be one with it, actually we soon learn that we do not have to give it that much. 

When we first find the one, we think to ourselves that the greatest mistake of human kind is that we, and the one, are in separate bodies, our deepest devotion is to them and we love what we have and love. But we soon realize that the one and us are indeed better off apart, that we do not have to give all we have and are to them. 

This is the sadness of human existence, that what we feel can as easily be over powered by what we know and what we know can as easily be over powered by what we feel. With understanding comes a deeper appreciation, we are not really called to love mindlessly, but with understanding. The tragedy is that we are more bent to choosing one and letting the other go than we are to have both in a balance. There are times when our fear of what may happen causes us to disregard our devotion and instead manage what we devoted to with pure mechanical hands. 

In us is the strength to walk a balanced walk, to love and think and yet remain right. We have the ability to live an unwavering life of devotion, the strength to free and be free in our devotion. When we determine to have it our way or to be intimidated by our thoughts, we choose to lose the greatness there is in redemption. The souls that have been freed are expected to free, but only those souls that have understood that freedom will truly free others. Our devotion is only as strong as we are, when it wavers for any reason, then we are that easily overpowered.

Short Notes On Suicide

When we think of life, we think of ourselves first. We regard our lives as the most important lives there are on the planet and therefore the most important worth saving and defending. Now there are moments when in regard of another life to be higher than ours we are willing to lay our own down if in so doing we shall preserve the life we regard more important. We have heard of the mothers who in the heat of a fire lay their lives down for their children, and whether that was by impulse or not, we shall not debate. So, we shall agree that life, and more especially our lives are very important and that if they should be wasted, it should not be by our own hands or with our involvement, active or passive.

 But when thinking of suicide, what power or force overcomes these pre-existing beliefs and the accompanying knowledge? The rest of the world will deem the person that commits suicide insane and yet that person will think of themselves as a hero. A hero releasing him/herself into a more free space, a more liberating state, one where there are no worries and no fears any more. And we may think about it this way, that it takes a lot more of all we have to commit suicide, more faith, more courage and even more love... the love for self. In the space where we can detach ourselves for all that reminds us of both here and who we are, suicide is committed.

Slow death and the agony that comes with that are concepts many of us wish never to experience, actually had it not been a definite end, most of us would wish never to experience death.

The reality is that most of us die on a daily basis, commit the slow murders without as much as a thought. We call it protecting ourselves, being careful, learning to forgive and never to forget. The point is that while we despise the people that commit suicide for all the deception they have embraced as truth, we fail to realise that we are equal victims. Theirs drops them to pits unimaginable but ours let us leak into the same pits a litter at a time.  

There have been many times when an honest extension of love has been translated into a reminder of pain and hurt. While we have seemed to move on, the bits of ourselves we leave behind and the load we carry have not let us move on. We have merely fooled ourselves to think that we were making progress, that we were free spirits again but in reality, we are the same old hurting self we were when we first hurt. We hold every one in check to prove if they will measure up to our standard of okay and every time they do not, we write them off in the spirit of ‘I don’t care.’ We have become the beings that will need others for a moment and never want to rely on them, we hide ourselves far on the inside that we have stopped to even recognise our very selves.

The shame of the living is to love with the fear of risking our hearts, to be friends without sharing ourselves and to embrace without accepting both ourselves and the ones we embrace. We can all trace the trail of our death, we can all locate when we started dying if we care to find out. The rot of our death can be found in every habit we have created for self defense and not all self defense but the kind that keeps us far from everyone that seeks to get close. And while we deem them weak and cowards that take their lives, we need to realize that we share in that cowardice, all of us that have subjected our living to that death., that suicidal death.

The State Against The Nation

It’s hard to grow up in a home where the father is the symbol of all terror, both to the children and the mother that chose him and gave him all these privileges that he has finally disregarded.  I was not raised in a home with parents, but I saw such homes and wondered how the children ever lived to it. But now that I am older, my sympathies go out to the women who chose such men, who forsook the advice of many other loving and loved ones to believe and cling to the man’s word. We could call them fools but love has reasons of its own and we are never wrong for having faith in our decisions and that things are going to get better, or that we are right. Faith like that should never be scolded even when we are definitely heading in the wrong direction or there would be no reason for person will. 

So they find themselves in a miserable corner and they are making all these vows and promises to do and never to do and yet in reality, the more the make such vows, the more the hurt each other but themselves and the children more. Some have got out of such marriages, but many are trapped by this life long commitment and by the desire to raise their children in a home, even though where they find themselves at the moment is far from home. I speak for women but we need to know that there are also men that have tried to bring the world home to a rebellious woman, one who only wants death for the marriage. A whore in her intentions and deeds, those men have suffered brutally, because the failed when they did their best and when they sought to get better but were not helped at all. 

But how do we reconcile the determination to withhold that which should help all get better, how do we advise one to save that which they once sought after so passionately to feed themselves in the time of drought and famine when the food is availed? I think there is no way of getting that out well. The man that was supposed to hold and cherish finally bruises and tears, the wife that was supposed to cushion and curdle begins to crush and grind. We see that in our societies, we have been victims of good intentions crushed or the very people that have crushed the other’s good intentions. The point is we hide ourselves far below the surface and we put those that we chose and that chose us to the impossible task of finding us and locating us form beneath the rubble of pain and greed that we lay.

We each have turned into a time bomb, unwilling to unveil ourselves, thinking that we are protecting ourselves and yet we are creating better grounds to destroy ourselves. We all can only persist for a while because persistence has a purpose and while the purpose persists in not coming forth, defeat is bound to happen. The nation gives its sons and daughters the liberty to form a state and take care of the nation, but because they have deep conceited motives that may not favour the nation, they abuse that right with terror and treachery.  What was meant to be the state and the nation becomes the state against the nations.

We are all bleeding, all of us that have been betrayed, and this union is beginning to feel so virtual that many of us fail to realise it. The wives are walking out and leaving the children to the fangs of time and that is the story of our union. We have taken it and turned against each other, some more vicious that the other and when the nose is squeezed so hard, it finally bleeds. To all the couples that have turned against each other, to the individuals so eager to hide themselves, we have this one opportunity to meet and talk like grown ups, to realise that there is not shame in expressing our fears and interests and to be faithful to our union and to each other.