When I was nine years old, I lived in a world where I felt completely isolated from social mirrors that reflected back my beauty to me. It was very rare that I ever heard the words "I Love You", and having moved from a relatively nurturing small town to a very hard edged city, I also endured the shock of experiencing a new culture that had absolutely zero reinforcement for my personal and spiritual values.
However, I had within myself a profound receptivity to spiritual beauty, a quality that I had first become conscious of as a toddler who so trilled to the dances of thunderheads upon sun and sky.
When I was nine years old, as I walked through a particular garden up the street, the flowers told me that they love me. Of course, I didn't hear it as a physical voice; instead it was a silent knowing communication from them to me, and in this process I felt somehow affirmed and grounded in my otherwise confusing and overwhelming environnment.
As an adult, I recognize that my ability to receive love on such subtle levels equals my ability to give love as well on subtle, radiant and unspoken yet spoken levels.
During my teen years, I discovered a heaven-like scent that would ride the breezes on balmy humid evenings in the Spring. The scent was so tender and heart touching to me, that it almost moved me to tears. I began a campaign to uncover the source of that amazing scent, and within two years linked it to the Black Locust tree blossoms that would come out in May. For one who has never smelled that scent, I might best describe it as a combination of smells including honeysuckle, lilly of the valley, lemon blossoms, and concord grape all rolled into one.
Thus late May became a pilgrimage for me to a special sacred beauty that included the blossoming of this scent, awakening of leaves on trees, arisal of summer-like humid weather and birth of frequent thunderstorms with their passionate lightning, thunder and rains.
As an adult I understand that the beauty I so merged with at that time mirrors the beauty I have within myself that includes an essence of loving and nurturing sweetness, passion, softness, warmth, tender embrace and electricity. And that I am able to both unconsciously and consciously express this beauty in my connection with others so that they might have a Garden Of Eden-like experience of love and acceptance, as well as nourishment.
All of this is so important because we have been taught that in order to be worthy, we must find those qualities outside of ourselves, and unless we make them happen in our environment, then we somehow do not have worth.
Yet, the opposite is true - - as we come to embrace and savor the beauty that we experience in our world that surrounds us, and when we make the connection that this beauty also lies within us- ready, eager and available to give to others as well as to ourselves as needed - a whole new paradigm of acceptance and love as well as complete sufficiency manifests within us and our lives in general.
Thus, rather than trying to "get" something from our environment, we now see ourselves as catylists for those very qualities that we seek because we realize that we are those qualities embodied within ourselves.
I invite you to take an inventory of things of beauty that you appreciate or enjoy in your world. These include traits of beauty that you experience in nature, music and other people. Next after that, turn it around to acknowledge the following: "If I see this beauty outside myself, than I must also have it within me. Thus, I am capable of expressing these very traits in the world".
As we do this outer and inner inventory, we then advance our spiritual development from a quest to see and grasp our worthiness to an accounting of the wealth of greatness that we already have within ourselves and may therefore express freely into the world for the benefit of all sentient beings.
Where oh where are you? I hope you are alright. I miss you.
This is a wonderful post, I really enjoyed reading it. Thank you for sharing this.
Love and Blessings,
AngelBaby
Posted by: AngelBaby | January 18, 2009 at 12:00 AM
What a joy to receive your comment about my Post, Angel Baby.
Affirming much beauty for you in your day today..
Blessings,
Stephen
Posted by: Stephen Levine | January 21, 2009 at 07:35 PM